Spontaneous Brewing Insights | 12min snip from Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine Podcast

Speaker 2
How about Russian River? You all have a slightly or had a slightly different approach doing this at the pub early on. Now at the new brewery here in Windsor, in the room that we're sitting in, you know, it's purpose built for, for spontaneous, you know, cool ship cooling. Yeah,
Speaker 3
I was, you know, Rob mentioned the trip, that, that great trip that he and i and our friends took and um such an inspiring trip and maybe a month later natalie and i were on our own trip to belgium back at cantillon hanging out with jean and um again he said exactly what rob said he told natalie and i you can spontaneously ferment anywhere in the world it's just might be different process different flavor. And we took that to heart, came home and immediately took out a row of barrels in the barrel room at the Santa Rosa 4th Street pub and had a local fabricator make a tank. It's not a wide shallow vessel like Cantillon has, Allagash or what we see now here in Windsor. It's long, narrow, it was deep. It's what fit in the room. The room doesn't have outside air, so it's just exposed whatever's in the room. But it made almost from the beginning beautiful spontaneous beer. We would cool the wort and still do when we do make beer there. John and I were talking about this yesterday. I like that spontaneous beer at two years, whereas we've only started using spontaneous beer here from the Windsor Brewery just this year. That's three years old now. It just takes longer. It's more brett forward. The Bertanomyces is way more forward young here almost undrinkable our window is 40 degrees fahrenheit here in windsor but in santa rosa we cool the wart down and then it sits overnight and then it goes into barrel so hybrid process but now here in windsor quite traditional but always using a you know lambic style recipe I think it's somewhat well known in the beer world we use the term synambic so Sonoma and lambic contracted together but we but we get a really nice acidity we've learned through temperature that by adjusting our wort temperature, we can soften that acidity, that acidity that was so forward on the early Wild Friendship beer that now as we drink both the Belgium and the U.S. one right now, they're much softer than the original versions.
Speaker 2
Wart temperature?
Speaker 3
Yeah, for sure. Wart temperature either at the pub at the temperature in which we're cooling it to or here, not necessarily wart temperature, but ambient air temperature outside. So 40 Fahrenheit is our limit, our top limit that we go to. We don't have to worry about it being too cold here the coldest it gets is 25 fahrenheit so we can do it any time during the winter we just got to look ahead and and see i'm i'm curious though to do a fall spontaneous fermentation in our cool ship here in windsor where we're exposed to the outside air through the windows because we're in the middle of wine country we've got even though we are in a pseudo-industrial park we have wineries all around us and I'm just curious what we would get even though the temperature will be higher be slightly warmer we could also compensate by potentially cooling the wort just a little bit but still using most of the outside air the first time we would do that we'd probably just go all in and see what what we get but um you think because of the prevalence of wine grapes and the natural yeasts that uh that
Speaker 2
come along with them that it might produce a different kind of fermentation that
Speaker 3
that's my curiosity well
Speaker 2
that that raises another interesting question you know as you all were getting into this you all had made beers with Britannomyces before that. Was there any kind of adding or, I should say, celebrating these cultures within the areas that you were going to cool ship in?
Speaker 3
Not for us. You mean like doing some... Like with Cantillon, when you moved breweries
Speaker 2
you take the old old beer and uh you know christen the the room with the old beer to kind of we
Speaker 1
we we moved the part of the the the production but not not the production itself so it's uh we bought in 2014 a new building um and uh only for the the storage so to to let the beer age and be sure to recreate the same atmosphere, to be sure, you never know with nature, but to give maximum of chains, we spray the walls with wort and with lambic. And 11 first brews we put in the new building. All the barrels were barrels already used in the historical building. And it worked. So the lembic aging in the new building are as nice as the one coming from the historical building. I don't know if it's because we sprayed the walls or
Speaker 3
not. That might have just been a waste of good lambic, John. Maybe, yeah. Some people were angry. We didn't do anything with the walls here. We just went all in with the, I think you know this, Jamie, all this wood came from Sierra Nevada's Mills River property. And Ken and Brian were nice enough to give us this untreated pine.
Speaker 4
Yeah. And same for us. We talked about it. You know, we did talk about, cause we had read those stories about Cantillon or other places, but you know, for us, it was, we were starting from scratch, right? We were starting something experiment, like I said earlier, to see if you could do these kinds of beers in this environment. So it felt a little bit like, well, that wouldn't really be testing this theory if we went and sprayed a bunch of Cantillon on our walls of the, of the cool Ship room. So we really wanted to see what would happen without it. So, yeah. I'll
Speaker 5
add one more thing, though. Jason mentioned the superstition aspect. We did christen, right before brewing our first batch, we christened our Cool Ship with a bottle of Cantillon. So kind of like when they launch a ship, we broke a bottle over the leg of the cool ship. And one of the things we did do, though, is, and I think we did this from batch one, we pump a couple barrels or a barrel or so of wort out into the cool ship a few days in advance, just to kind of get the environment going with microbes. And we did that a few times. And I think it did kind of charge things up with the microbes. And I believe we do that each year now, just get a little bit in the cool ship, kind of feed the microbes that are in there. We also used wood from, well, not the same wood but similar uh uh the our cool ship looks similar on the inside because we used pine that was milled from the site that our brewery was built um so and it's a rough cut wood so i think it does do a pretty good job kind of um harboring a culture probably a much better job than say if it was a real cleanable tile. We
Speaker 6
also christened our cool ship in this room with the original Belgian version of the Wild Friendship Blend from 2015. We didn't want to waste it, though, so we actually drank the whole bottle. We didn't want to clean up broken glass, so the bottle sits up there by itself up on the wall. It's
Speaker 2
interesting to think about the dynamics of spontaneous fermentation through a season. But that is something that I've also heard from other brewers. Jester King has mentioned that, that the first brew is always the big question. And then further brews help the culture get a footing. I know Chad Jacobson at Crooked Stave with their spontaneous beers, they put everything through the cool ship. And he was saying that that has helped that the culture, like to develop a foothold to that. Talk to me about that kind of that process as you brew through a season and how the beers change, you know, and how that fermentation dynamic changes.
Speaker 3
We also put not just synambic through our cool ship. We'll put portions of temptation, supplication, consecration that then end up in a fermenting stainless steel tank. So we're putting more than just synambic through it. A part of that is to help get the room charged up, get the wood full of the bugs and critters and whatnot. Our early, I can speak to our very first batches in here, weren't that good. They were very one-dimensional. They were very, very phenolic. We definitely dumped a couple few batches. And then in time, the room got a little more lived in, if you will. The walls became, you know, inoculated, I guess, through the steam. And now we have pretty consistent, you know, flavor profiles coming out. But again, as I said earlier, it's a very slow aging process for us out of the wort we're getting from here. I don't, that first brew of the year, then when we spontaneously ferment is always a little bit of a, it's a roll the dice, not because of anything else other than when you think about even Allagash and Russian River as, you know, two of the earlier adopters of spontaneous fermentation in America in modern times, Like, we still haven't done it that long compared to these guys. I don't remember the first batch. I'm
Speaker 1
sorry, but I'm an old guy, but in 39, I wasn't there.
Speaker 2
But even in a season, you know, that first batch will perform, you know, it'll ferment at a different rate or a process
Speaker 1
when we restart the season the first batch is always a bit uh a bit special yes it's uh because we restart the brewery because we we have always a bit more risk of uh of defect you know the the the old equipment uh didn't run during seven months approximately. And there is always a risk to be broken, a problem with machine, with the boiler, even if we are always producing a fake brew with water before to to restart the season so it's always a bit more stressful but for the rest no yeah and I'm always a bit more stressed also to wait the start of the fermentation that's and when the first batch start to ferment okay the the
Speaker 4
can start really. With
Speaker 2
Allogash, you do that twice then, right? Since you're not brewing through a continuous season.
Speaker 4
Yeah, so we do, we start in the fall and we do see, if we do a series of batches in the fall, we do see increased speed of fermentation, just strictly from a visual, like watching the barrels start to ferment. The batches that are brewed, batch three, batch four, batch five of that season do tend to kick off, you know, faster. So that kind of lends kind of evidence to the waking up of the room, if you will, and getting getting those microbes happy again. We actually aren't brewing all that often in the spring. We still do it on occasion, but the spring in Maine is a little, a little bit volatile, if you will, like one day it might be, you know, super cold. And then the next day it'll be in the fifties. And with our temperature range now is about, it sounds like similar to Russian rivers. We're top, top end of 40 Fahrenheit and we prefer it more in the 25 to 35 Fahrenheit range. And so those, those nights are harder to come by, honestly, in April and March. So we tend to do most of our brewing in November and December.
Speaker 2
Sure.

247: Allagash, Cantillon, and Russian River Weigh in at the Spontaneous Brewing Roundtable

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