Celebrimbor's Secret Runs Three Barrels for Three Elven Rings

Named for the Elven-smith who forged the Rings of Power, Celebrimbor's Secret rests in gin, orange liqueur and rum barrels with blackberry, pomegranate and cherry. Three barrels, and three rings he made alone.

Style: Triple Barrel Aged Gluten Free Dessert Beer
Release Date: 2026-09-12
ABV: 10%
Corporate Ladder Brewing Company (Palmetto, FL)

Most of the names on Corporate Ladder Brewing Company's Lord of the Rings lineup come straight out of the films. This one goes considerably further back.

Celebrimbor was the Elven-smith of Eregion who made the Rings of Power in the Second Age, thousands of years before anything in the trilogy takes place. He worked under the guidance of a fair-seeming visitor calling himself Annatar, who was Sauron. The Three Elven rings were the ones Celebrimbor forged alone, with no part of Sauron in them, and then kept hidden. That is the secret the name is pointing at.

The beer is triple barrel-aged: gin, orange liqueur and rum. Three barrels, three rings. There is nothing in the brewery's announcement claiming that was deliberate, but the arithmetic lines up.

Gin is the unusual barrel here. Gin is not typically an aged spirit, so a gin barrel generally means a cask that held something else first and was later used to rest gin, and what it gives back is botanical rather than sweet: juniper, coriander and citrus peel. Placed next to an orange liqueur barrel, the citrus side of that doubles up rather than competing. The rum barrel is the sweetener sitting underneath both, bringing molasses where the other two bring aromatics.

The fruit additions stay within one family. Blackberry, pomegranate and cherry are all dark, tart and tannic in their own right, and pomegranate in particular carries an astringency most beer fruit does not. Against three barrels' worth of botanicals and molasses, that tartness has something to push against.

At 10 percent, this is the second gluten free dessert beer on Saturday's lineup, a format Corporate Ladder treats as a core part of its range rather than an accommodation. The brewery's stated lineup runs from traditional lagers through gluten free beers built around desserts.

Celebrimbor's Secret pours on draft from noon on Saturday, September 12, at the Palmetto beer garden, with 16 ounce two-packs to go at $22. All event beer sales are in person, first come, first served, while supplies last.

Editor’s Take

Most breweries doing a Lord of the Rings event stop at the films, and who could blame them. Corporate Ladder went to the Second Age, several thousand years and one entire mythology earlier, and named a beer after a smith most of the room will have to look up. I admire this enormously. It is the beer-list equivalent of putting a deep cut on the setlist because you like it, not because the crowd asked.

The bit I keep turning over is the count. The Rings of Power came out of Celebrimbor's forge with Sauron standing over it, but the Three he made on his own, without the dark lord's hand anywhere near them, and then hid. Three rings, kept quiet. And here is a beer called Celebrimbor's Secret that has been through exactly three barrels. I have no evidence at all that this was planned and I refuse to check, because the arithmetic is perfect and I would like it to stay that way.

As for the barrels themselves, gin is the one to watch. It is a rare cask to see on a beer and it gives back something no bourbon barrel ever will: juniper, coriander, citrus peel, a whole botanical shelf. Set that beside an orange liqueur barrel and a pile of blackberry, pomegranate and cherry and you have a beer that is essentially arguing for itself in three directions at once. Fitting, for a man whose best work was the stuff he did without supervision.

Source & Editorial

JollyPint independently prepares release articles using information published by breweries through newsletters, websites, and other official public communications. Brewery-supplied descriptions and tasting notes are reported as provided, while editorial context is added by JollyPint.