Blending is usually a solitary decision. One person tastes their way along a row of barrels, forms a private opinion about which ones belong together, and nobody else gets a vote. Blind Enthusiasm Brewing Co. handed that job to a room full of people.

Ahead of Barrel Fest 2025, brewers from across Canada came to the Edmonton brewery to sample barrels and build a blend together. Barrel Fest Brewers' Blend 2025 is what they landed on: a 7.4 percent spontaneous beer in a 750ml bottle, drawn from barrels of four separate ages at once - two, three, four and five years.

That spread is the most interesting thing on the spec sheet. In spontaneous brewing, barrel age is the main lever a blender has. Younger barrels tend to carry the brighter acidity and fruit, older ones the depth, the tannin and the slower-developing character that only time supplies. Pulling from a two-year barrel and a five-year barrel in the same blend is a deliberate attempt to have both ends of that range in one glass rather than splitting the difference.

Blind Enthusiasm describes the result as herbaceous with subtle spice, red wine and orange, carrying a light bitterness, a fleeting clean tannin and a citrus-like acidity the brewery compares to wine. The tannin note is worth flagging: it is not a word that comes up often in beer, and it points at the barrel time as much as at the fruit.

Ten breweries are named on the label. Alongside Blind Enthusiasm are 2 Crows Brewing Co, Brasserie Dunham, Burdock Brewery, Dageraad, Low Life Barrel House, Neighbourhood Brewing, Nokomis Craft Ales, Sea Change Brewing and Temporal Artisan Ales. The brewery frames the roster as the point rather than the footnote:

This blend of 2, 3, 4 & 5 Spontaneous barrels reflects the diversity of the Barrel Fest Brewers and their commitment to keeping barrel aging and fermenting traditions alive.

The bottle was filled in November 2025 and has been conditioning and cellaring since.

Barrel Fest Brewers' Blend 2025 was poured at Barrel Fest and is available now in 750ml bottles through the brewery's online shop, with Canada-wide shipping.

Editor’s Take

The collaboration beer has become one of the least collaborative objects in the industry. Two logos go on a can, somebody drives four hours with a sack of hops, and the actual decisions get made by whoever owns the brewhouse that day. Nobody minds. It is a nice way to say hello.

So I am pleased by the sheer inefficiency of this one. Blending is the fussiest job in a barrel program, the part where one person tastes forty vessels and quietly decides which three go together, and Blind Enthusiasm invited brewers from nine other places to do it as a group. Anyone who has tried to get four people to agree on a restaurant will understand the scale of what was attempted here. Then the beer got poured at the festival and the whole roster went on the label, which feels like the correct ending: ten names, one bottle, and no way to work out afterwards whose idea the orange was.

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.

Barrel Fest Brewers' Blend 2025 Took Ten Breweries to Blend

Ten breweries sat down with Blind Enthusiasm's barrels and blended one beer together. The result pulls from four different barrel ages at once, and every name involved is printed on the label.

Source & Editorial