Dark Vineyard Ale · 9.6% · 440ml
When Carwyn Cellars invited us into the 2026 Black Box, the brief was clear: go hard or go home. So we obliged.
The Black Box pitch happened right as vintage was ramping up next door at Shiraz Republic — the crush pad running, the ferments starting, the sheds full of fruit. If ever there was a moment to make a beer that couldn't happen anywhere else, this was it.
We'd been here before. Back in 2019 we ran a small series of grape-and-wine co-ferments — three short runs of longnecks, all experimental. A Shiraz barrel saison, aged in an ex-red barrel. A pale saison co-ferment “pink wine beer” and a dark saison co-ferment “dark wine beer”, two batches split into two batches with grapes added straight into the barrel on top of the wort. These were hand bottled into longnecks. The kind of limited release you like to muck around with when you’re a brewery based at a winery.
Revisiting that concept seven years later was an exciting exercise, especially given the significant upgrades to our expertise and both our winemaking and brewing equipment. And the more we dug into the research, the more it made sense. Vintage co-ferments have a long tradition in Italian brewing — Italian Grape Ales is a formally recognised style category now, but the practice goes back much further. Beer and wine sharing a tank isn't a novelty. It's the oldest kind of drink there is.
How it came together
Brewed on the same day Shiraz Republic was pressing Shiraz for the 2026 vintage. 800 litres of high-gravity dark ale went into one fermenter — Voyager Atlas Latrobe as the base, Munich Schooner for depth, rolled oats for body and Carafa II for colour.
About 200 litres of fresh-pressed Shiraz juice went straight from the crush pad into the beer tank on day 1 of fermentation. Then on day 2 we racked 500L of the beer into our smaller unitank to steep on 120 kilos of crushed fruit (hung in grain bags) for a week of skin contact. This led to some fun tastings - contrasting the fruity base with the tannin and colour extraction happening in the smaller tank - before blending them together, removing the skins before we overextracted too much tannin from the grapes.
Fermentation
Belle Saison started the ferment on the base beer, followed by pitching EC1118 to work through the wine sugars. Both stalled out around 8% ABV, which is when the winery (no stranger to stuck ferments) got involved. We topped up with wine nutrient and pitched a new robust wine yeast, Lalvin CLOS, which closed out the ferment neatly. The beer landed at 9.6% ABV. Dry, warming, threaded with acidity and dark fruit from the young Shiraz.
Where it's going
Half the batch has been canned. It's in the Carwyn Cellars 2026 Black Box from today, with limited stock available now online and at our cellar door.
We saved a little bit which has gone into the barrel, watch this space in 2027. (Round two, Carywn?)
What a good idea.
You can catch Spencer and Daniel chatting about the beer on the Coolroom Craft Beer Podcast on YouTube HERE.
