The new old direction in Beer

Just like everything else, brewers look to the past, and the original innovators, to find the next evolutionary step.  Several excellent breweries in the vast American landscape have turned to wild fermentation and barrel aging techniques.  Obviously many zymurphilles  know all about the options from Russian River, Lost Abbey, Dogfish Head, New Belgium and others.  Recently Avery Brewing in Boulder was kind enough to open it’s doors and barrel room to host a lecture (of sorts) on how they have developed into a quality brett and barrel brewery.

In the recesses of the barrel room, Andy discusses Brabant, and it's follow up.

What are Wild and Barrel aged beers?

Basically both techniques go back to the origins of beer.  When we first began fermenting wheat and grain sugars in water, hops and other spices, we did not have the luxury of lab maintained yeast strains and temperature controlled stainless steel fementers.  Instead, we had to depend on the yeasts just floating around in nature, and whatever vessel we could find that could breath and stay relatively clean.  Today we called those wild and untamed yeasts “brettomyces”(brett) and the isolated, tagged and cultured yeasts “saccharomyces” (sacc)  Both of these little guys give us carbonation, alcohol and flavor, and there are hundreds of both types.  I pushed for a taxonomic clarification of the difference, but I was talking with Brewers, not microbiologists, so the basic gist I took away was that Saccs are most commomly lab cultured and relatively well understood and Bretts are not.  This could have led to the regionality of beers as much as water and grain.

Barrels are pretty strait forward.  Nearly all liquids, potent and not, have been stored in some sort of barrel at some point.  Wood, generally oak, seems to work very well for slowly fermenting, flavoring and resting alcoholic beverages.  The trend now is to get used barrels to add some of the resident flavor to the beer.  Just about any barrel is fair game, wine, whiskey and rum are in use in microbreweries all across the country.

American new interest in old technique beer

In the past decade or so brett and barrel beer has become increasingly popular in the United States.  Some breweries, such as Russian River and Lost Abbey, have throw an immense amount of weight behind this movement.  Not coincidentally both of those breweries are in California.  Others have slowly developed their own projects, such as Great Divide.  While many of the American companies are willing to share their knowledge openly with each other, each brewery has to approach these beers from their own angle.  Many do not have the capital and free time to play with the aging process.  Despite our best efforts, to this point, to scientifically isolate exactly the process of aging, there is still a very intuitive and natural touch needed to create a good or great barrel beer.  Fortunately for the beer connoisseurship world, more and more breweries are investing the resources into making these exciting brews.

In the recesses of the barrel room, Andy discusses Brabant, and it’s follow up.

Andy still pouring and answering questions

Pursuit of Hoppiness members intently watching the pours

Wine and Rum barrels for future projects

Brewer Fred Rizzo and his class

Avery’s forray into Barrels

About five years ago, the Avery brewing company obtained a few barrels from several locations, mostly wineries, and began their trial and error process.  For the most part, the public was not privy to the experiments.  However the few versions that were available at special events were highly sought after.  Many of the test beers, were existing styles that were scavenged and placed in barrels and fed to a wild yeast strain.  The yeast strain was obtained from a Belgian company, but Avery and their brewers have developed  it into their own.  Several other Brett strains have been played with in various experiments, but it seems that they will continue using this Brett strain for the majority of their commercially released beers.  After successes like Bad Sally and Rare Rev, and blends like Vogelbekdieren (sp) and Voltron, Adam allowed his brewers to produce Brabant.  Brabant is the first in a potentially tri-annual release of nine month or more aged beers, several of which will have some level of Brett fermentation.

A note on Sour versus Brett

Many of us in the high-end beer drinkers think of Brett beers and Sour beers as synonyms.  Many of the examples we have would seem to back up that idea, from the most mild of Jolly Pumpkin to the face squeezing Cantillion.  The boys at Avery are quick to point out that many of the flavors you get in a sour beer can come from Brett, the sourness actually comes from a bacteria.  Usually lactobacillus, or one of it’s cousins, which is the same stuff that gives us sour cream, yogurt and in some cases sourdough bread.  The direction Avery happens to be taking is that of fully brett fermented beers that are not necessarily sour, such as Fifteen.  I personally seek both, and it looks like we have a wealth of variations come toward us.

What to take away

Through this lecture, and tasting, we were served about eight beers.  They were everything from fabulous finished products, to early stage productions, to personal foul ups.  At some level I enjoyed all of them, but I am not going to tell you about any of them specifically.  I would much rather that you go to your local brewery and take a tour.  Ask them about their high-end and extreme beers.  Support them at their events and try their one-offs.  Give them feedback on the experiments they are kind enough to share with you.  Eventually you will have some products available that you can be proud of on several levels, and we will all have a healthier beer industry.

A Special Thanks

Thank you very much to the Avery Brewing Company for letting a bunch of passionate beer drinkers in to talk about, and expose us to this whole process.  Esspecially thanks to CV, Andy and Fred for putting it all together and sticking around to see it all through.

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