The trend gathered momentum. A quick survey of the changing list of beer categories at the Great American Beer Festival in the past decade tracks the evolving passions of American craft brewers. Through the 2000s, the number of Belgian-style categories expands; a separate sour beer category is added, then another; wood and barrel-aged categories appear, then multiply as entries grow; and distinctively American takes on sour, wood-aged, German and Belgian styles emerge.
Small breweries that staked their fortunes on these unusual beers have seen their bets pay off. Ron Jeffries, who founded Jolly Pumpkin Artisan Ales in a garage in Dexter, MI, ages all his bottle-conditioned beers in oak. He acknowledges the risk of being at the leading edge: “Selling all oak-aged sour beer when we opened was quite a bit tougher than it is now. One would be justified in saying it was quite tough, and calling us pretty silly to only brew sour beer. To this day we receive email: ‘Hey, did you know your beer is sour? I think you have a problem.’ Not as many as when we opened, but we still do.”
Cascade Brewing Co. in Portland, OR, has been stunning consumers and beer judges with Northwestern sour beers, many flavored with local fruits, spices and flowers, nurtured in a barrel house that contains over 300 barrels. Brewer Ron Gansberg stays away from wild yeast, preferring lactic fermentation instead. Cascade acquires barrels not just from wine sources, but from spirits as well. The marriage of sour beer and bourbon-barrel aging has made his Bourbonic Plague a prize-winner.
At Upland Brewing Co. in Indiana, brewer Caleb Staton brews wild beers modeled on traditional Belgian lambic practices, but with an American accent. His fruited sour ales include kiwi and persimmon, a clear break with European tradition. He calls the sour beer market “a niche within a niche,” where “sourheads” are emerging alongside better-established “hopheads” among the enthusiasts.
Now, in a second decade, brewers are clearly intrigued by the possibilities of wild/sour/woody beers. The Festival of Wood and Barrel Aged Beer, hosted by the Illinois Craft Brewers Guild, held its eighth event in November of 2010, with 156 different beers for its guests. Among the more intriguing entries, “Wild Acidic Beer aged in old French oak wine barrel with Brettanomyces bruxellensis, Lactobacillus, Pediococcus” from A.C. Golden Brewing Co.—the experimental arm of MillerCoors. If it seems strange that Coors is dabbling in wild yeast, it is worth remembering that Blue Moon, based on a once-obscure Belgian wit beer, is the most successful specialty style to go mainstream.
Probably more significant for the craft beer scene, after this issue goes to press, Vinnie Cilurzo will be hosting a symposium at Russian River prior to the annual Craft Brewers’ Conference, which he describes as “an intense social gathering of brewers who are either making or interested in making sour/barrel beers.” He explains, “This is vital because if a consumer gets hold of a sour/barrel beer that is so far out there and potentially ‘off,’ it could affect the long-term decision he or she makes towards this style of beer, and this won’t help anyone. This is such a niche market that I don’t see any real reason to be secretive about what we do or our process.”
Two-hundred brewers have signed up for the symposium, and another 50 have had to be turned away. Some niche.
Peter Bouckaert rejects the idea that this is the next wave in so-called “extreme beer.” Instead, he makes it sound like a return to brewing’s organic roots. “I don’t think of this as extreme brewing,” he says. “To me, Budweiser is an extreme brew. Because, in nature there are a lot of stable, robust cultures that are a mixture of different yeasts and bacteria. There’s so much out there and what do we do with nature? We clean it up. To what? Sacchromyces cereviciae took over the beer landscape and made it very boring.”
Sour, wild, wood-aged beers are anything but boring. Their unpredictability can be unnerving. So many more of nature’s variables are at play during fermentation and maturation; the brewer is dealing with complex ecosystems, not a straightforward industrial processes. But beer lovers who embrace these new interpretations are finding flavors that stretch our modern definition of “beer”—and remind us of its origins.
