Paging through old brew logs with Lauren Salazaar of New Belgium today, she took me all the way back to day 1 — the day they filled their first barrels with beers like Fat Tire and 1554 on their way to developing the base beers we know today as Felix and Oscar. May 14th, 1998. That's how far back some of Americas best, and original sour beers date to. And here we are 18 years later (that's 6,590 days), sampling out of foeders that contain countless generations of the same microbiology still at work on beers like La Folie, and lending their character to new wood still coming in the door.
Sidebar: that's pH1 you see listed there — the same barrel that went out to Russian River to get things rolling, and eventually ended up at The Rare Barrel. This amount of history on this single page is redic.