New Beer Alert! If you've seen our 2009 Release Calendar, you know we plan to release a brand spankin' new beer (dubbed 'Brand X') this spring.

Here is the latest on 'Brand X' ...

First off the beer is our Sah'tea. If you read the great Dogfish profile in The New Yorker last fall, this is the beer we test-batched while the writer was visiting. This beer is based on the traditional 9th century Finnish recipe for Sahti in that we brew it with rye and juniper and heat the wort with wood-fired rocks. Then we break with tradition (shocker!) by adding and exotic Black Chai Tea toward the end of the boil.

With the hot-rock method, a Sah'tea brew day certainly isn't your typical day in the brewhouse! We're still working on the kinks of how to pull off this brew on the bigger system, so our planned spring release will be pushed to summer. Stay tuned for the latest on the release of Sah'tea!