From Maine, With Love - An Allagash Brewing Podcast

S2 Episode 4: What is Wild Beer?

• Allagash Brewing Company • Season 2 • Episode 4

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What's the difference between wild and sour beer? What makes a wild beer wild? And how do bacteria like lactobacillus and pediococcus make beer taste deliciously tart? We cover all of this and more with the help of two seasoned beer experts: Jason Perkins, our Brewmaster, and Zach Bodah, our Quality Program Manager.

Brett Willis:

So this is for Maine with Love, an Allagash Brewing podcast where we talk about beer, our community here in Maine, and things that generally make us happy. Uh, Liz, this is,

Liz Wilson:

Uh, yeah,<laugh>. I talking about wild

Brett Willis:

Beers. Talking about wild beers.

Liz Wilson:

I love wild beers. They're some of my very favorite. Um,

Brett Willis:

Yeah. And if you don't even know what wild means, this is the episode for you. Yeah. We dive deep into what makes a wild beer wild, what makes it different from another beer, what makes different from between wild and sour. Mm-hmm.<affirmative>, um, the sort of bacteria you'll find in a wide wild beer. Not bad, just the si sort of thing that gives its flavor fruit. Yeah. Yeah.

Liz Wilson:

And you don't even, you don't need to, to know about what's happening. You can just come onto our tasting room, ask us about it, come to the sellers. Yeah. You've got plenty to share with you. Yeah. And I, I think, you know, if there's a lot of people out there that say they don't like beer, and I would, I would say give, give this a

Brett Willis:

Try. Yeah. This is the beer for those people who think they don't like beer. Yeah. Yeah. And so we, I mean, we have two experts here with us, uh, helping us, uh, talk all about it. It's, uh, Jason, our brewmaster and Zach are quality program manager. Two, uh, people who know quite a bit more. They've, they know more about about beer than I, they've forgotten more about beer than I've ever known<laugh>. That's what I was looking for. That's the phrase.

Liz Wilson:

It's, yeah,

Brett Willis:

It's true. Uh, yeah. Uh, so yeah, if you wanna learn about wild beer and, uh, what, what it even is, what it's all about. And even some of the in-depth stuff, uh, behind the, the production of it and how you make sure it's all tasting great. This is the episode for you.

Liz Wilson:

Yeah. Tune in.

Brett Willis:

I'm, I'm joined here by Liz Wilson. Hello. Hi, Liz. Hey, uh, Jason Perkins, uh, our brewmaster. Hello. And Zach Bodah, our quality program manager.

Zach Bodah:

Hey there.

Brett Willis:

Thank you for coming, uh, because we're here to talk about wild beer. Yeah. Wild beer. What is it? What makes it wild? How does it taste? It's, uh, it's gonna be a good one. And so before we get to beer, though, gotta do some good secret questions. So, Zach, we're gonna start with you. Uh, what is the most effective play in peewee football?

Zach Bodah:

Most effective play in peewee

Brett Willis:

Football? Like, what would you use if you were like, we're gonna win this game,<laugh>, is there a play?

Zach Bodah:

Well, what is Peewee? I'm trying to think what age that

Brett Willis:

Might be. What do you, what do you normally coach though? It

Zach Bodah:

Depends on how old my kid is at the time.

Brett Willis:

Let's say, would say like, nine year olds.

Zach Bodah:

Nine year olds. That would be Jet sweep. Jet Sweep. Yep. Oh, hand the ball to the fast kid and let'em run around again.

Brett Willis:

<laugh>, I, I knew there was gonna be an answer. That's good.<laugh>. How about if they're like 12? Does it change?

Zach Bodah:

Yeah, it changes. They can throw the ball a little bit at 12.

Brett Willis:

Okay. Okay.

Liz Wilson:

But nine still feels like highly capable sports, I feel like. Yeah. I don't know. How old are you in like first or second grade when it's just a hive of children running around the field?

Zach Bodah:

Six, seven, first, second grade, right.

Jason Perkins:

Something like that. Yeah. No

Brett Willis:

Problem. All right, Jason, you're next. What is one of your favorite bars in Ghent? Belgium doesn't have to be the best, but I just am kind of like, I'm interested in your own personal sort of vibe.

Jason Perkins:

Man, that's a good one. There's so many good bars in Gantt. Um, I, I really like, uh, I like doula greet and troll Calder, which are both like near each other. So Trollekelder, like, uh, troll cellar. So there's all these creepy trolls everywhere. Yep. Yep. And Dulle Griet got this thing where, uh, if you order a certain beer that comes in a, a special glass, they don't want you to steal it. You have to give'em one of your shoes,<laugh>. And then you put your shoe in this basket and they put the basket up in the skies. So if you go in there on a busy night, you'll see like a basket full of like six or seven shoes, so that if you, if you really want the glass, you just have to run with one shoe. With one

Brett Willis:

Shoe.<laugh>, have you seen anyone

Liz Wilson:

Run? Yeah, I bet people have

Jason Perkins:

Done it. I think they've got a pretty established program there where no one steals the glasses. Ah,

Brett Willis:

That's good. Yeah.

Liz Wilson:

That's good. They're like, we don't need security cameras. We're just gonna take your shoe.

Jason Perkins:

That's right. Yeah. Yeah.

Brett Willis:

I don't know. I did actually get to go to Trollekelder when we were on our trip and it was, uh, yeah, it's got the, I feel like the, the creepy g Nome or the creepy gnomes and trolls do help to like, add the ambience. It makes it a little more, I think it makes you feel the beer perhaps a bit more, uh, because you're seeing old, weird trolls and stuff, but good beers.

Liz Wilson:

But then do you get weird nightmares? You're like, you've had a few. I don't know. I feel like that I would be chi I dunno. You could,

Brett Willis:

I didn't experience it, but you definitely could.

Jason Perkins:

I, I hesitated a little to answer your question cuz my favorite bar in Ghent is no longer open.

Brett Willis:

I was, I was wondering. I was thinking so

Jason Perkins:

Had a good run. I'm

Brett Willis:

Sorry.

Jason Perkins:

Velootje. Yeah.

Brett Willis:

Yeah.

Jason Perkins:

So those who have been there understand. Yeah.

Liz Wilson:

Need no need, no explanation.

Brett Willis:

Yes.

Zach Bodah:

Just a normal classic bar<laugh>.

Brett Willis:

Yes.

Jason Perkins:

It's not like any other bar you've ever seen in your life.

Brett Willis:

Yeah. A lot of stuff hanging from the ceiling. Yes. Uh, from as far as I understood. Uh, Liz, I wanted to ask you a secret question. Oh, ed. So secret. I didn't even write it down.

Liz Wilson:

I see that<laugh>.

Brett Willis:

All right. Uh, I thought of this like five minutes ago. What is the hardest part you ever played in a, uh, theater theatrical play?

Liz Wilson:

Oh gosh.

Brett Willis:

Like, it could be most lines. It could have just been like, difficulty of singing.

Liz Wilson:

Um, wasn't hardest, but from an early age, I really wanted a part in this like fifth grade play. And I don't even remember what the play was anymore, but it was like, cast for a, a male and I was, I just like threw a fit because I felt like I sang it best<laugh>. And in like fifth grade I had this like, gender crisis where I, I was like, no, I want this role. And then they're like, no, it's for a boy. And I was like, that's not a good enough answer. And so I don't know that kind of, that

Jason Perkins:

It's not a good enough answer.

Liz Wilson:

No, it wasn't. It's not a good, sometimes I think back on that and like as a fifth grader, having that sort of gut reaction to things and it sort of not shaped me, but I feel like it was just a really interesting experience as I started getting into musical theater and choirs and bands and things like that.

Brett Willis:

That's a formative experience.

Liz Wilson:

It was.

Jason Perkins:

Wow. That was a deeper answer than I bet you

Brett Willis:

Expected. A hundred percent. I dunno, that's why I asked these questions, cuz this is, they're really interesting. And

Liz Wilson:

We had, you know, I think we had a really wonderful music department shout out to southeastern Connecticut public school system. Um, I, I think fairly unexpected, but, um, I, there was a lot of dedication. We'll tag them on Instagram,<laugh> Public School, region 18<laugh>. Um, just a lot of respect for the theater. And so there was a lot of dedication and or teachers, um, shout out to the music teachers cuz they put a lot of effort into Yeah. Uh, rehearsals and things like that. So I always felt pretty well prepared.

Brett Willis:

Wild beer. We have a couple wild beers in front of us. Yeah. Shall we, shall we pop them open?

Liz Wilson:

Yeah, let's

Brett Willis:

Do it. All right. Sweet.

Liz Wilson:

Yeah. I think wild beer, um, is confusing and wonderful and I didn't know much. Oh,

Brett Willis:

Wow. Good timing.

Liz Wilson:

Tandem. Let's break open this beer and

Brett Willis:

Yeah, it is, it is. Yeah. It's, it's, yeah. Well, the first question I feel like will help us dive in. Um, and I'd say for Jason or Zach, whoever's feeling like they want to answer it, what does the term wild mean?

Jason Perkins:

Hmm. Uh, yeah. It's a, it's a complicated world, so therefore the answer is a little complicated. But, um, you know, it's, it's an Im, I'll first say it's an imperfect term for these type of beers that we'll talk about today. Um, but it's kind of the best one we've managed to come up with. Um, oftentimes beers in this realm are referred to as sour beers by a lot of consumers. Yep. And, um, we certainly use that descriptor and this bottle we're drinking here says sour red ale aged with, and which we'll get into in a second. Mm-hmm.<affirmative>. But, um, we don't like to refer to that as a style because, you know, we really feel like sour is a descriptor mm-hmm.<affirmative> flavor descriptor. Mm-hmm.<affirmative> not a beer style. Yeah. And there's also just this huge range of sourness that any beverage, food, et cetera, can have. So, um, calling it sour doesn't really tell the whole story. So, you know, we've been trying to use a different term for, for a long, long time to capture kind of the really range in creativity of these type of beers. And we've chosen the word wild. Mm-hmm.<affirmative>. So try not to get too technical here, but in, in a nutshell, during the process of making the beer, we use something instead of, or in addition to saccharomyces, which is the traditional, um, brewers yeast, basically mm-hmm.<affirmative>. Yep. So, you know, there's hundreds and hundreds of strains of saccharomyces that have, are used, um, in making beer that provide a wide range of flavors. So saison yeast and white beer yeast and et cetera, et cetera, which we use A lot of these beers that we call wild might use one of those saccharomyces strains, but something else is also used mm-hmm. Some other kind of wild microorganism or instead of, so, you know, for us that's mostly, um, three organisms, um, brettanomyces, lactobacillus and pediococcus, or the three most commonly used, you know, organisms that participate and, and contribute to the, to the beer and the flavor that comes through in the beer.

Brett Willis:

Gotcha. So let's, let's break those down cuz we just mentioned them. So lactobacillus, what does lactobacillus do in beer? Zach?

Zach Bodah:

Yeah, great question. Um, lactobacillus, it's a tiny lactic acid producing bacteria. And whereas you have yeast which would consume sugar and produce ethanol and co2, most lactic acid bacteria, lactobacillus specifically is gonna create, um, ethanol and lactic acid. Okay. Rather than co2.

Brett Willis:

And lactic acid is just tartness, basically? Or is it more than that?

Zach Bodah:

Um, it's, yeah, it's a natural acid that it's the same compound that makes milk sour. Mm-hmm.<affirmative>, same compound that makes a lot of your sour candy sour. So if you're sucking on a sour patch kid, it's lactic acid on the outside of that, most likely. That's okay. Giving you that think warhead.

Brett Willis:

And when you say milk sour, it's like turning milk into yogurt. Correct. Not like milk going bad.

Zach Bodah:

Oh, milk going

Brett Willis:

Bad. Oh, milk going bad. Yeah.

Zach Bodah:

Oh, so that's not exact, that's a bad descriptor for that<laugh>. Yeah.

Brett Willis:

In terms of the beer, like bad

Zach Bodah:

Compound itself in, in terms of lactic acid, it's the same, but it's interesting. That's not what makes milk taste bad, that's not lactic acid

Brett Willis:

Okay, gotcha, gotcha. Just the sour aspect. All right. So then that's lactobacillus.

Zach Bodah:

Yeah. And it may, it may do ethanol and lactic acid, it may do lactic acid and CO2 uhhuh. There's different combinations, different lactobacillus may produce different metabolites.

Brett Willis:

And then, so like when we say ethanol too, that's alcohol. Yes.

Zach Bodah:

Okay.

Brett Willis:

That's just the al the type of alcohol that you will find in beer is ethanol.

Zach Bodah:

Correct. All right. Good.

Brett Willis:

Good. And then, all right, so we'll jump to pediococcus, which always sounds like a disease to me, unfortunately. But<laugh> I always feel like I, like I should like my throat's scratchy, but no, it's a good, it's a good thing when you use, well, what is, what is pediococcus? What

Zach Bodah:

Does that do? It's another family of, uh, lactic acid producing bacteria. You know, both of these things, lacto and pedio for short. Um, these are things we are trying really, really hard to prevent from contaminating our, our core lineup of beers. Mm-hmm.<affirmative>, anything that's not wild. Right. So, you know, we have a laboratory, uh, a very robust quality control program, which microbiology is a huge, huge part of mm-hmm.<affirmative>. Um, and we are testing, uh, our beer from, from wart leaving the brew house until months and months after the beer has left the brewery in a package, um, to make sure that none of these lactobacillus pediococcus, beer spoilage organisms are in our beer. Mm-hmm.<affirmative>. Um, and I'm sorry, I'm going on a tangent there. No, no, it's good. It's interesting. I mean, these are, they're things we don't want in, in our, our regular beer, like 99% of the beer that we make. Yep. Uh, but it's something that we celebrate in, in these termed wild beers. Yeah. It's a, it's another bacterium. It's a, it's anaerobic, you know, these bacteria anaerobic in that they will grow and thrive without the presence of oxygen. Mm-hmm.<affirmative>. So in a, in a bottle of beer or a barrel of beer, there's, there's very, very little oxygen mm-hmm.<affirmative>, uh, that's when they're gonna take the opportunity to grow and, and spoil or produce lact acid.

Liz Wilson:

Nice. Yeah. It's fascinating how in one process of brewing, you're really not wanting the bacteria, but in wild beer, which is so, you know, we have it literally separated by buildings here at the brewery. Um, and I'm sure, I don't know how long that's been the case, but now you go into the barrel roaming, you know, it thrives. Yeah.

Zach Bodah:

<laugh>.

Jason Perkins:

Yeah. I mean, we've always had some level of separation between the wild beers and our regular beers and, and our regular barrel aged beers. Cause of course, a beer like Curieux is right. A barrel aged beer, but not, not a, what we would call a wild beer. Um, but it's been in a totally separate building for about 12 years now.

Liz Wilson:

How does all of that wild stuff actually get into beer?

Jason Perkins:

Yeah. There's actually a number of different ways that it can happen. Like, you know, Zack kind of alluded to the way that we don't want it to happen Yep. Where it's unintentionally or whatever. Um, you know, one thing that's worth noting, I guess when we're talking about microbes is, you know, one of the things about making beer is that, you know, at least at this point in time, there's no, uh, pathogens that have ever been shown to be able to grow in beer. So the microbes that we deal with are, are not dangerous in the way that some microbes might be in, you know, making, uh, uh, milk or mm-hmm.<affirmative>, right. You know, chicken fingers or whatever mm-hmm.<affirmative>. Um, but because of the presence of alcohol, lower pH and hops, um, pathogens just can't live in beer. So the number of microbes that can thrive or live in beer is small. Mm-hmm.<affirmative>, uh, the other side of that coin is the ones that can love to mm-hmm.<affirmative>. Right. And so we have to work really hard to keep it out of the beer as we don't want in. And literally every brewery in the world, the most cleanest brewery in the world, which I hope we're one of those, uh, you have those microbes, brettanomyces, lactobacillus, pediococcus somewhere mm-hmm.<affirmative> like no matter what you, so you have to do everything you can to keep'em out. So we do a very good job of that. Uh, and then there is, as Zach alluded, two areas where we intentionally add them, uh, or potentially allow them to thrive. So there's really a whole bunch of different ways that we can do it. Probably the simplest way the beer we're drinking now, um, this beer starts, the base beer for this beer is, um, I should say we're drinking a beer called Once Upon an Orchard, um, which is actually a series of beers. Yeah. This particular one is a sour red ale age with blueberries, raspberries, and vanilla bean. Yeah. So the beer starts as a, um, fairly non-descript red ale. It ferment normally with a normal saccharomyces strain, and if you had it at that point, it would be fine, but fairly uninteresting red ale. It then gets sent over to our wild beer land and ages in a fu here, which is, is a very large oak tank. And we add lactobacillus andpediococcus to it. And so we're actually adding our culture. Yeah. We have our culture kind of going all the time in a little tank called the Minion Tank. Yeah. Um, so we'll add that to it. So that's like, it's like a culture that we've created and, and nurtured for a very long time, and that we can add to beer mm-hmm.<affirmative>. And during the, when it gets added to the beer with time, it'll produce lactic acid and turn a, again, relatively non-descript red ale into a tart red a And then in that case, we use it, use that base beer to age on fruit. So that's one way that the microbes can be added. We can also use, um, preexisting kind of inoculated beer, so beer that already has that culture in it. We can add some of that to it. That's another very old technique for making these kind of beers. Sure. Um, we can add fresh, we use a lot of fresh fruit. Yeah. Fresh fruit is always covered in some level of these microbes. That's another way. Um, and then finally, which we'll probably I assume we'll talk in more detail about is our spontaneous beers, which is a whole different process for, uh, adding, and I'm doing air quotes for those of you mm-hmm.<affirmative> who can't see me. Yeah. Uh, adding the microbes to, to the beer. Yeah.

Brett Willis:

Is like part of the reason why we use the term wild because some of these, uh, exist in nature. Like some of these bacteria just kind of exist, or where is the origin of like, kind of wild,

Jason Perkins:

I don't know where the origin of, I don't, I'm not gonna pretend we were the first ones to use it to describe the beers we make. We've embraced it fully for sure. Definitely. I mean, it's, it's, it's like any word. It's just a word. I mean, it's a word that is, like

Brett Willis:

Words have meaning, Jason!

Jason Perkins:

It's, it's an imperfect description for the kind of beers we make, but it's like the best we've come up with so far. Yeah. We really like the broadness of it, the broadness of it. But I guess to answer the question more directly, yes, lactobacillus and pediococcus are all organisms that, that live in our environment, but yeah. So does, so yeast, I mean, all totally, totally. Not to go down a rabbit hole, but, you know, clean yeast, uh, clean, that all came from somewhere<affirmative>. It's not like it was manufactured on a lab. Like it was a wild yeast at some point, and it got so it's like domesticated.

Brett Willis:

It got domesticated. Yeah. Yeah. It's a feral yeast. Yeah.

Zach Bodah:

I feel like the term wild beer is just the brewer admitting some kind of lack of control in the process.

Brett Willis:

Sure. Yeah.

Zach Bodah:

Yeah. Yeah. Where, you know, everything is so structured when you're producing an allagash white or an ipa, these tame beers as we, we refer to them Yeah. Mostly. But you throw it in a barrel, you lose some control, you add of a culture of bacteria. You're not telling that bacteria how sour to make the beer. Yeah. You're kind of at the will of the culture itself. Totally. Um, look at fruit. If you're, you're throwing fruit in, you don't know exactly what's on that fruit. You're, you're, you don't have control over. Yeah. The bugs coming in on that at

Brett Willis:

The whim of, of some of nature

Zach Bodah:

Bugs as That's a better answer.

Jason Perkins:

That's a better answer than mine. But

Zach Bodah:

Bugs as

Brett Willis:

Bacteria<laugh>. We'll just cut your answer entirely, Jason. Don't worry.<laugh>, I've, I have two kind of follow up, uh, thoughts from that. One is we've never actually defined brettanomyces so could one of you define what brettanomyces is

Zach Bodah:

For us? Sure. Uh, brettanomyces is another genus of yeast, so single cellular yeast, but instead of Saccharomyces, it's brettanomyces mm-hmm.<affirmative>, um, it is less commonly used in brewing mm-hmm.<affirmative>. Um, however, with Belgian traditional Belgian brewing, it's been celebrated mm-hmm.<affirmative>, uh, it is mostly an enemy to the wine industry. Uh, if you talk to people who know their wine or maybe some inventors or, or wine makers, they, they don't look kindly at Brett. And at least that's Yeah.

Jason Perkins:

Yeah. Except for my understanding, certain select, you know, natural wine makers might

Brett Willis:

Right. The newer

Jason Perkins:

Embrace, but new garden and, and most winemakers really think it's the enemy.

Zach Bodah:

Hmm. And it produces, again, different metabolites than Saccharomyces or brewers yeast. It's more assertive a lot of times, you know, there's, there's as many species of bread as there are species of Saccharomyces. So, um, you can't just blanket brettanomyces, uh, these defining characteristics. But a lot of the time it's a slower ferment. Uh, they can produce a little bit more of a acidic acid than a Saccharomyces, but they usually ha have more phenolic, um, wild characters. I'm thinking just generically, how do you, how would we term those? Like,

Brett Willis:

So like acetic is like vinegar, right? Yeah. Yeah. And then phenolic is more like spices we normally say, right? Like clove

Zach Bodah:

Spices, uh, or you can go as far as bandaid, bandaid can go That's right. Yeah. To horse blanket, but you can also go tropical fruit and pineapple mm-hmm.<affirmative>. And, um, it's a pretty wide range of characters.

Brett Willis:

Yeah. Probably one of the most well known beers with Brettanomyces in it would be orval, I'd say. Right. Or Yeah. More widely available perhaps.

Jason Perkins:

Totally. Yeah. Yeah.

Brett Willis:

Which is a delicious beer, by the way.

Jason Perkins:

One of the best in the world.

Brett Willis:

Yeah. Amazing beer.

Liz Wilson:

How do you, how do you track our wild beers in their like, okay, we've either added or blended or, you know, stuck something out in our coolship Well, which we'll talk about, but then how do you, I know, you know, just monitoring, tasting, and how quickly do you know if something is headed in the right direction versus like, oof, they've taken over.

Jason Perkins:

Yeah, I mean, we, we do have, uh, good record keeping in general for, you know, like we do for any beer, whether it's in a barrel or it's in a tank. Like we know what went in there in, in what fruit went in there and that kind of thing. So that, that, that part's, um, relatively simple. Um, but in terms of like monitoring it through the process, it's almost exclusively sensory based. Mm-hmm.<affirmative>, um, you know, there's some analytics we can do in terms of density or sugar content and pH and stuff like that, but in the end it's, it's how it smells and taste that matters. Mm-hmm.<affirmative>. Yeah. So you've basically just monitored by tasting barrels throughout the process. And for certain beers that we've made before, like our cool ship beers we make every year, and we've been making'em since 2007, there's a little bit of like an understanding of the cycle of it mm-hmm.<affirmative>. So for example, we won't, I won't even basically try those beers until a year. Hmm. Roughly. Yeah. I mean, there's, I've kind of found there's not really any reason to, for the most part. Yeah. Uh, whereas if it's a newer beer, we're trying something new, new, which we do a ton of like super small scale fooling around stuff Yeah. Then we might be checking a little bit more often and checking in on, on how it's smelling and tasting. Right.

Brett Willis:

I think that that goes into the other question that had my mind of like, how do you wrangle control back if these beers are somewhat kind of doing their own thing? You know, what are the brewers, what's the toolkit that you have?

Jason Perkins:

Yeah. I mean, I, I think about it like simply say like, with beers like this and Zach's right. Like, you, you surrender some control, um, but it's not like you surrender at all. Right. Right. Like, and so I think about it like we control as much as we can control, and then, you know, blending kind of gets us out of that, uh, is the final quality control piece, which of course we'll talk about. But in terms of control, like we still are the room that these barrels sit in is temperature controlled. Mm-hmm.<affirmative> year round. That's a piece that we haven't surrendered. The quality of the barrels is something we take very seriously and make sure the barrels are in good shape when we use'em for the first time. If we have barrels that aren't producing the way we want, they go away. Mm-hmm.<affirmative>, you know, with the coolship, um, program we only produce certain times of the year. Right. Um, et cetera, et cetera. So there's not like, there's no control, but you're surrendering a bunch of it. Um, and sometimes you'll have completely unexplained two exactly the same barrels from the same batch of beer sitting side by side next to each other on a rack, and one tastes great, one tastes awful. Hmm. You just don't know sometimes. And so blending and dumping barrels that don't taste great are, are like, that's the quality, that's like the final quality control piece for mm-hmm. S like this mm-hmm.<affirmative>.

Brett Willis:

Yeah. And by blending, it's, you're taking multiple different barrels and putting them together in different amounts to get the desired flavor profile.

Jason Perkins:

Correct.

Brett Willis:

And like, you had a really, I think, I don't remember even when you said this could have been on a, a re a previous podcast, but it's like you can't blend away bad, right?

Jason Perkins:

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I mean, if, if, if a barrel, um, if a barrel has a certain off flavor that we're not excited about, like it's just, you know, you can only dilute it down so far before it's not worth it. So, you know, we, uh, people always ask me how much we dump and I don't have a great handle on that Exactly. But it's significantly more loss, if you will, than any other process we do here because, and it has to be something you kind of accept going into it. Mm-hmm.<affirmative>, like, we're gonna probably dump 20 to 30% of the beer we make in that room. Wow. And if we don't, the overall blends not gonna taste good. So it's just kind of part of it that,

Brett Willis:

That just like builds into the kind of like the romance of these beers. For me it's, it's like they're so, it's so hard to communicate all of that on the label when you have like 45 words and you also need to talk about the ingredients and whatever else. And so it's like, so we have our Cellars experience. We've talked about that before. Like I feel like that's the perfect venue to enjoy these beers where you get to talk about them, hear about them, see where they're being aged for years at a time. And like, there's a lot that goes into'em and they're really thoughtful. So yeah, it's fun to kind of,

Liz Wilson:

It's really interesting because I feel like a lot of times you talk to people and sometimes you hear, oh, I don't care for beer. And then you give them a coolship or you know, one of the Once Upon an Orchard series and it sort of is a very different experience than I guess what you envision in drinking a typical beer or, and I, I don't know, is there like, yes, they taste very different, but I don't know if there's like a underlying answer as to why that is. But I've had that conversation and I'm sure it happens in the tasting room all the time where, you know, a guest will say, oh, I'm sorry, I don't care for beer. And one of our tasting room staff says, oh, you know, try this. And it's like, oh my gosh. It's so different than than anything I've ever had. So

Jason Perkins:

I don't know. Yeah. I mean, it's made, you know, it's the beer's made with similar ingredients is standard beer. Right. It's malted barley and it's wheat and um, hops of course. And it's carbonated, but that's kind of where that, where it ends. Mm-hmm.<affirmative>. Yeah. Like beyond that. And a lot of these beers are way more similar to wine than they are to beer in the flavor profile, aroma characteristics, et cetera. Totally.

Brett Willis:

So, I don't want us just gloss over it because I actually think we're gonna have like an entire episode about coolship stuff. Like I feel like that is just such a dense subject for us to go over. But if we could do a high-level, cuz we talked about it a couple times, like what is the coolship brewing process? Like what sets that apart from what we just talked about of you brew a beer, you ferment it with Saccharomyces, and then you age it in one of these foudres with fruit, potentially what makes a cool ship beer different?

Jason Perkins:

Our coolship program we started in 2007, um, and uh, it was basically a pro a project which we called it to start with, like to basically see if we can, um, make what, what is referred to as spontaneously fermented beer in greater Portland. Um, at the time, kind the conventional wisdom was you could only make a beer in this style. So in the Lambic style mm-hmm.<affirmative>, we don't call our beer lambic, but that is after the processes modeled after Lambic, which is a traditional, um, very old style. Um, originally out of Belgium, Brussels, Belgium region specifically. And at the time, 2007, the conventional wisdom was you could kind of only make these beers in this like magical radius around Brussels. Uh, and you know, we talked to some, some of the lambic blenders and brewers over there, they didn't necessarily feel that way. So we basically said, let's, let's give it a go and, and try it. And, uh, you know, without getting too deep into the weeds, technically speaking, like it's basically the brewing process is similar to a normal traditional beer. There's some nuanced difference to it in terms of, um, the ingredients you use in the process. But in the end, instead of taking what's called the wort, you know, the hot liquid that comes out of the brewing brewhouse before it gets fermented, instead of cooling it down, um, in a closed system like a heat exchanger, which is 99.99% of the beer made in the world is done that way, you send it fully hot. So boiling temperatures to a vessel that is referred to as a cool ship. So it looks like a, a big brownie pan, basically this big, uh, shallow vessel, it goes into that which is in a dedicated room that we have here. Uh, dedicated building, small building actually. Yeah. And it stays in that, uh, room overnight. And in the process of being in this open topped vessel, it one cools down, uh, hence the name Cool ship, but also gets inoculated with natural micro flora in the area. So wild yeast, Brettanomyces, um, a whole bunch of different things. Uh, and then it, um, ferment. So that's where the term spontaneous comes from, which is again an imperfect term, but mm-hmm.<affirmative>, you get the idea. Um, natural fermentation's probably a little bit of a better word, but, and then it goes from there into oak barrels and lives in those oak barrels for, uh, one to three years before it's finished. So it's very long, very traditional, uh, very slow fermentation process.

Brett Willis:

So I once referred to it, to it as the like sourdough method of making beer, I think with, with Patrick around. And Patrick was like, that's not really right.

Liz Wilson:

<laugh><laugh>.

Brett Willis:

I was like, what is it? Like, kind of close, maybe<laugh>,

Liz Wilson:

But bringing you back down. Right.

Brett Willis:

Yeah. Well, you know, I only know so much, I don't know much of the science.

Liz Wilson:

Yeah. And is the one to three year just, it's like literally I guess for cool ship as in cool ship for Resurgam. Like we've kind of dialed that in, we know after a year, like you'll check that and see how it's going. We'll blend that in for consistency

Jason Perkins:

And then Yes. Yeah. One, two and the Resurgam is our, is uh, unrooted. Cuz we do have several versions of beer with the same base beer that is an unrooted version. It's, you know, it's our kind of shoutout or, uh, interpretation of a gueuze. Mm-hmm.<affirmative>, which is a traditional lambic style beer mm-hmm.<affirmative>. Um, and it's is one, two and three year old one. And the amount of each one of those changes a little bit each year. Mm-hmm.<affirmative>, um, again, sensory based, but we always need a little bit of one year in there for the, for, for, for yeast and a little bit of residual sugar Hmm. Because we don't add any yeast for the bottle fermentation process. Mm-hmm.<affirmative>, we need young yeast basically, cuz two and three year old sitting in a barrel for that long, the yeast that's in there is not, not so happy anymore. Yeah. So the, the one year old's really just there to help re ferment the bottle and then the two year old has some acidity built up, but not quite as complex. And the three year is like, you know, has, has the same acid as two years, you same tartness as a two-year-old, but a little bit more depth and roundness to it.

Brett Willis:

How has our approach to blending those beers together changed over the years? Have we, like, cuz I just remember when we did the original, like, um, we did a wild friendship blend with, uh, three different, we've, we've done this blend where we send beer around and it was with, uh, Russian River and, uh, Cantillon in Belgium. And I remember, um, hearing you Jason talk about how perhaps we did a slightly more assertive blend than we would've otherwise putting perhaps some more of the, like more expressive beer, the more sort of brettanomyces, like that sort of stuff in there. Whereas maybe now we do a slightly more nuanced blend. Like has that, has our philosophy around the flavor of those beer changed over the years or not really?

Jason Perkins:

I wouldn't say the philosophy has changed a lot. I think the biggest change of all from the early years is the amount of options or stock, if you will, ah, right. To choose from. So in the first, so we started in 2007, brew a couple batches, 2008, a couple batches. So you figure we're blending for the first time in like 2010. And you know, we had, okay, it's either that barrel or that barrel<laugh>, you know,<laugh>. Uh, whereas now we have b we've been brewing for years and uh, we have a stock so we can, we just have more choices. So, um, that just inevitably makes the beer a little bit more, more rounded. That said that, I mean I've recently had the 2011 coolship resurgamand still good.

Liz Wilson:

Why do these, I, and I feel like people hang on to these beers, um, more so than other beers and they do age, um, pretty well. What, why is that?

Zach Bodah:

Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, a lot of it comes down to preference. Yeah. Um, definitely. Um, there is some subjectivity, but these, the majority of these beers have a lower pH which if you think about if you're canning tomatoes or you're making sauerkraut and these things last for a long time mm-hmm.<affirmative>, these beers last longer, they're, they're less prone to rapid aging because they have a lower pH level. Um, and a lot of times the, you know, the aging has already been done for you. Jason's talking about two, three year old beer. Like Right. A lot of those oxidative characteristics that could happen with beer aging have kind of already happened. Hmm. Um, and they could be masked by other characteristics in the beer.

Jason Perkins:

Yeah. I like, there's a, um, a Rodenbach, which is a very amazing historical brewery in Belgium still in existence and a huge amount of barrels and ton of respect for what they do there. Rudy's their longtime brewmaster there and he describes it as a preservation through acidification<laugh>, which I would just like that simplicity of that term. And that is just, yeah. The, the, there's something about the tartness of these beers and the presence of of of, uh, Brettanomyces and wild yeast in the package that really protects it from the typical, um, effects of oxygen and aging over time.

Brett Willis:

This is so outside of the realm of what people normally consider beer. Like, it's just fun to, to talk about and sip and like, you know, I've had like half of a 10 ounce glass in this entire time and it's like, ah, it's great. It's just nice to think about.

Liz Wilson:

Yeah. And if you're listening and you've never had these beers or have always wondered, come ask our tasting room Oh yeah. Staff. They will, they'll give you a taste and be happy to, to share with you all about it. Cuz it's, I'm sure it can be intimidating to just even understand what this is, so. Yeah.

Jason Perkins:

Uh, and we usually have something on the tasting room. Yeah. At least a, something that's, that's in this, if not several Yeah. That are in the realm of what we call wild beers. But yeah. Tasting room staff super knowledgeable, they can Right. Walk you through'em all or do the sellers experience

Liz Wilson:

Or do the same

Brett Willis:

Stuff. Amazing. Yeah. That's a great place to do it. Al also, I think just, uh, on top of all this, like while we say these are expressive, there's a lot of character going on, they're really good. Like they're really tasty. They're not gonna have to work too hard to be like enjoying these beers. Mm-hmm.<affirmative>, they're just really tasty, balanced beers. So, so

Liz Wilson:

Yeah.

Zach Bodah:

The balance is key. You know, this is key. It's, uh, I know we, we talked about categorizing these beers as sour beers and uh, it's really not always true. They're, they're, there's usually a level of tartness for sure. Yeah. But to say that they're sour is, is kind of one dimensional. Right. And it's easy to make a, can you

Liz Wilson:

Think of

Zach Bodah:

An example Super

Liz Wilson:

Sour that is a wild beer that's not sour.

Jason Perkins:

It depends on how you define sour. Right.<laugh> like, to some degree all beer is sour. Yeah. Because it's, it's, you know, 4.2, 4.3 pH and you know, water is six or seven. Right. Right. Uh, but, um, I mean I think like something like interlude or confluence mm-hmm.<affirmative> are both beers that come to mind for me, which are Brettanomyces-focused beers. We would call those both wild. Mm-hmm.<affirmative> and Confluence especially is very similar. Acidity level is Allagash White. Hmm. And Interlude is a little bit lower. So that's again, like I said earlier, and to reinforce what Zach said, like that there's just such a spectrum Yeah. Of sourness that can express itself in these beers. And so just calling it sour alone just kind of doesn't tell the whole story. Yeah. And

Liz Wilson:

I, and I feel like there, there's an interesting, I feel like in beer trends, there's a lot of talk about sour beers and you know, there's kettle sour, which is not what we've been talking about at all. So I guess in like a very quick explainer, what is the difference between our, you know, wild beers that are sour and kettle sour beers?

Zach Bodah:

One word would be finesse. I think<laugh> honestly, um, you know, kettle sours are produced with lactic acid producing bacteria. Right? Yeah. It's the same thing that is producing a lot of the acid in, in these wild beers that we're producing here. But, um, like I said, you can, you can do it short and quick or you can let, let the process happen naturally over time. Um, and it's really easy to make a beer of sour in the kettle by just letting the word sit overnight and you throw some bacteria in there that lactobacillus grows very fast Hmm. Produces acid very well. It's very good at what it does. Hmm. Um, and now you have super sour word and knock it out, stick it on the fermentor and pitch some yeast. Not all kettle sours lack finesse, I would say. But you know, you start off with sour word, you're asking a lot of your, your brewers yeast, your Saccharomyces a lot of times they do not want to, they aren't happy fermenting at mm-hmm.<affirmative> 3.2 pH Yeah. You know, starting that process at 3.2 is it's Sure. It's, it's a, it's a brutal task.

Liz Wilson:

Are wild beers. That's a huge experimentation part of our, our brewery. Or are there ingredients that you are excited about trying out for some of these wild beers that are coming up on the docket here? I mean, we use a lot of different fruits. Um, yeah.

Jason Perkins:

We haven't really else, we haven't really talked about the fruit. I mean Yeah.

Liz Wilson:

I know

Jason Perkins:

It's such a huge part, such a star of the show with these beers. Yeah. Uh, and we, um, you know, we use almost exclusively main grown fruit Right. And all freshly harvested. And so we're getting fruit from a farmer and it's going in the beer that day. So it's, it's right up. Right. And you know, anyone who's eats fruit from a grocery store and then goes to the farm and does pick your own, like they're night and day like, they're just totally different. So, you know, you, you can, the farmer can pick for us when it's like falling off the tree or the bush at its height of its ripeness, which probably would like compost or rot in like a day. It, that's why you can't get it that way in the grocery store. Yeah. Um, so we could just get the, the most fresh, delicious fruit you can imagine. And we add a ton of it to, to beer and let that really, the acidities, the, the acid beer, the, the sour beer is the base for it and the fruit really gets to shine. So, um, working with Maine fruit, I, I don't wanna say it's limiting, but there's only a handful here in our cold climate that can grow. So it's, you know, it's raspberries, blueberries, cherries. Mm-hmm.<affirmative> peaches, strawberries. So still a pretty amazing range of, of some

Zach Bodah:

Fruits,

Jason Perkins:

Some good fruits there. Fruits we just started working in the last year or two with, um, honeyberries also referred to as Haskap. Uh, has a bunch of different names and just really, I'm totally in love with this fruit. It's nothing like, um, it's, it's like familiar the flavors it produces, but it's also unique at the same time. Hmm. Um, it's got a little cherry, it's got a little date, it's got a little blueberry mm-hmm.<affirmative>, it's got all these various components to it. And so we've made a couple really fun beers without fruit.

Brett Willis:

And our once we have a once upon orchard with honeyberries too. Right. That's coming

Jason Perkins:

We do. This year.

Brett Willis:

It's coming out. Yeah. And like, so in this beer we're tasting, we have, we have raspberries, we have blueberries, we also have vanilla. And I feel like, Zach, you talked earlier about balance and I feel like how we treated that vanilla, I think is very Allagashy

Zach Bodah:

Uh, this vanilla is, you know, talking about fun new things for Yeah. For Allagash wild beers, brand new. We've never used vanilla. And what form is the vanilla in Bean? Bean scraped Bean. Yeah. Cutting half bean

Jason Perkins:

Madagascar vanilla beans, like cut open and scraped. Wow. That's

Brett Willis:

Awesome. So what like, I mean, cuz it, this beer is not vanilla eat. No. You know, it's what do you think it adds to the beer? What sort of a component are you finding?

Zach Bodah:

Yeah, that's a good question. Uh, really it just adds another layer of depth. Sure. I don't think if, if, if you didn't tell me there was vanilla in there, I wouldn't be like, oh, this is a nice vanilla beer<laugh>. I think it's, you could confuse it for barrel character. Yeah, sure. You know, a lot of times with a fresh barrel you're getting, um, some vanilla in there. Um, it is a little different and it, it works really nicely with the, the raspberry in here.

Jason Perkins:

Yeah. Yeah. I, I will say I often like not always, there's some cases obviously we, if we want to make a raspberry beer, we want you to be able to taste, like look at it, smell it. But in the case of, of spices especially, I really like it when it's at this level where if, if you just give me the glass of beer and I drink it, I'm like, man, that's familiar. It's really cool, but I can't put my finger on it. And then the person's like, vanilla and you're like, yes. Ah. Like then you've hit that that level perfectly in my mind. Yeah. Yeah. With a lot of these things. And that's what we were shooting for here and we did a bunch of really fun trials with different vanilla bean types. And you not surprised just like fruit or anything else, it's a pretty wide range and how it contributes to the beer. And we added it after the fruit, uh, and aging portion and kind of like a, not to get into the process, but like an infusion method where we could slowly add it and get it right where we wanted it and stop. Huh. Um, that's awesome. And so I'm super happy with how it turned out. Yeah.

Brett Willis:

That's cool. Yeah. Oh, it's super tasty. That's a grape beer. If you want to go and find Once Upon an orchard, you'll be able to find it through our website. You go to allagash.com/locator. We have a beer locator. You can try to find some bottles near you or Yeah, you can just come to Allagash. Come to visit us in Portland, Maine. We'll definitely have some bottles here, uh, for the near future. I imagine we only can make a finite amount as like, you know, we only get so much fruit. But, um, thank you both. That was awesome. Thanks for having us. Thank you. It's super fun. I know. Some of my favorite. Let's wait for the honey berry. Oh. Oh, wait for that honey berry. Well, cheers. Cheers. Cheers cheer. See you. This has been an Allagash production. And if you have something you want us to talk about on the show, shoot us a message at podcast@allagash.com.