Brewer’s Go Buggy!

These
American-brewed beers are starting to find their way into
the New England beer market. They’re similar to classic
Belgian beers, they’re complex in flavor and aroma, they’re
hot with the high-end beer customer, and they’ve got a
margin like wine. Interested? You should be; the right shop
can do a nice little business in these specialty products
(as can a savvy wholesaler who orders in small, pre-ordered
lots), and they’re great cross-over sales to wine
drinkers.

The Belgians
produce these beers – by spontaneous fermentation, just
leaving the beer open to the air, or by exposing
fresh-brewed beer to biota-infested wooden vessels – and
call them lambics and Flemish sour ales. Orval, a unique and
hallowed Trappist ale, gains its dry, puckery character from
a deliberate exposure to wild Brettanomyces yeast, the same
“brett” that can add complexity to – or ruin –
wine.

That’s how the
Belgians have made these beers for centuries, and a small
number of brewers continue the arduous process. Over 2OO
different strains of microflora have been identified in
these beers so far. They are highly prized by connoisseurs,
and largely held to be strongly a product of their place,
shaped by microclimate and biological environment. It was
thought that producing them outside of these areas in
Belgium would either be impossible or
disappointing.

American brewers
have come to this frontier and boldly stepped across, as
they have so many times with other types of beer.
“Fermentation with saccharomyces cerevisiae is only the tip
of the iceberg,” said Cody Reif, a staff microbiologist at
New Belgium Brewing in Ft. Collins, CO. “Using other
organisms opens the door to many flavors and aromas you
can’t get with a production yeast strain. In the end, these
organisms are another tool to make great creative
beers.”

Reif puts his
finger on why brewers are experimenting with these different
yeasts and bacteria, despite the more demanding cleaning
regimen they require: “flavors and aromas you can’t get with
a production yeast strain.” If you know the profiles of
lambic beers like Girardin or Boon, of Flemish sours like
Rodenbach, you know that Reif is understating the issue.
These beers are vinous, dry, tart, ‘funky,’ or even outright
sour, yet the best of them manage to pull it off with a
beautiful drinkability and complexity, the very character
that makes them so highly prized by a small number of
drinkers who are willing to pay for the
experience.

You’ll have to
expect to pay for the experience, too. These beers are
expensive to brew because the non-standard biota work very
slowly, and not always predictably. “I’ve used Pediococcus,
lactobacillus delbrueckii, brettanomyces lambicus, and
brettanomyces bruxellensis,” said Phil Markowski, the highly
regarded brewer at the Southampton Publick House on Long
Island. “The typical cultures, you could say. It takes a lot
of trial and error to work with these strains. People expect
these cultures will react the same way saccharomyces yeasts
will. But you don’t see the activity. They work so slowly
and steadily that there’s no perceptible change. Any visual
changes appear over long times. You kind of have to forget
about it, have the discipline to just leave it
alone.”

Whenever trial
and error enter the brewing process, with the concurrent
possibility of recurring failure, prices go up. Add to that
a brewing process that can take six months or more of
maturation, and you start to understand why these beers
command retail prices of $8 and up for a single 12oz.
bottle.

“It’s
challenging and stressful to make these beers,” said
Allagash Brewing’s (Portland, ME) Rob Tod, where they’ve
just introduced their first brett beer, Interlude (see
sidebar). “It takes a long time, because you have to make
sure the brett’s done; you don’t want the fermentation to
continue in the bottle, it could burst the bottle. Also, you
can’t just pick up the phone and talk to twenty other
brewers who work with it; there’s a lot of mystery to the
process. Finally, you have to be extremely careful about
sanitation. Otherwise, the brett will get in any and all of
your other beers and do the same thing it does to the beers
you carefully invite it into. It’s a bald-headed, feisty
yeast.”

The Russian
River Brewery, out in Santa Rosa, CA, is gaining a
reputation for bug beers. They’ve already got a reputation
for hop-monster beers. Brewer-founder Vinne Cilurzo is
generally credited with having invented the Double IPA
category of beers – his Pliny the Elder is one of the
biggest of the batch and his Pliny the Younger is a triple
IPA.

But it is
Cilurzo’s bug beers that are causing the stir right now. He
has six: Deification, Sanctification, Temptation,
Supplication, and Beatification are planned bug beers, and
the sixth is the result of an accidental brett contamination
of a batch of Redemption, an abbey-style single, that turned
out so well, they made more.

Cilurzo
explained how that contamination happened, by way of
explaining how opportunistic the brettanomyces yeast is.
“When I was testing out some brettanomyces beers,” he said,
“I took a homebrew bucket with the spigot on the bottom, and
bottled some Temptation with it. Then I racked out 5 gallons
of Redemption into it, after rinsing it well with hot water.
Six months later that Redemption had brett in it. That’s why
we have two of everything: hose gaskets, pumps, gloves. We
keep it all in what we call our ‘brett bucket’, just for the
wild beers. There’s an inherent risk in having wild yeasts
and bacteria in your brewery.”

He also worked
with some barrels Reif had seen at New Belgium, where brewer
Peter Bouckaert had aged his magnificent sour beer, La
Folie, in them. “I took Redemption and put it in the
barrels,” he said. “I didn’t add any of my own critters.
Twenty-one months later it’s very lambic-like, no fruit,
very tart.”

That points up
two things quite clearly: again, these are beers that take a
long time to produce and take up a lot of space in the
brewery (barrels are very inefficient containers compared to
31,OOO-gallon stainless steel fermenters), and that there is
more than one way to source your bugs. As mentioned earlier,
the Belgians open the windows – literally – to let air-borne
bugs in, and sometimes deliberately “dose” a beer with a
culture, but they also use wood aging to consistently
“infect” a beer with the biota that take up residence in the
porous wood of the barrel.

New Belgium is
evidently using a combination of sources. With a resource
like Peter Bouckaert, a Belgian himself and an expert on
wood aging of beers, it’s not surprising. “The organisms
themselves and their origins are a bit of a trade secret,”
Reif said. “All our wood-aged beers contain some combination
of lactobacilli, pediococcus and brettanomyces, along with
other organisms as well. In Belgium, many of the breweries
don’t have a standard yeast strain, they use the native
flora via spontaneous fermentation. Whether or not that was
an effective means to procuring organisms is up for debate.”
Indeed, you’ll hear more about the open windows than about
the bugs in the barrels, but the bugs in the barrels
represent a much more consistent source of biota.

Bacteria, wild
yeasts, tart, dry, funky, sour – why do people want such
odd-tasting beers, anyway? “It’s the same answer as with our
Curieux,” Rob Tod said. “It’s really good! You can put this
in front of a wine drinker: it’s very balanced, it’s
complex, not too dry or sweet. I think it’s a great beer to
pair with food, cheeses particularly, and I thought the
escargot match we did at a recent dinner was a home
run.”

It doesn’t have
to be over-powering, either. Greg Hall, of Goose Island
Brewing in Chicago, makes a brett-tinged beer named Matilda
(a sly reference to the origins of the Abbey that makes
Orval). I had a chance to taste it at WhiskyFest Chicago.
Matilda is brett-influenced, but not overwhelming. “The
brett should be there,” Hall told me, “but it shouldn’t be
all that’s there.” Goose Island’s beer is in New York, and
should be coming to New England soon.

Chris LaPierre
is a big sour beer fan. He used to brew at Harpoon, and he’s
now head brewer at the Iron Hill Brewpub in West Chester,
Pennsylvania, where he makes bug beers often. He looks at
‘why’ from the aspect of the brewer, and comes up with a
‘because it’s there’ kind of answer. “It’s one of the last
frontiers in American brewing,” he said. “Americans have
perfected replications of time-honored European styles and
gone a long way to creating uniquely American styles, like
the ultra hoppy San Diego styles. What’s left? Until five or
ten years ago bug beers were really the only styles in the
world that Americans didn’t brew. That’s
changed.”

While it’s a
small niche within a niche, it looks like bug beer is here
to stay. “Without a doubt, the market is expanding,” said
Tod. “It gets back to when we started here, 11 years ago. I
went into some Portland accounts with samples of our White,
and people said, ‘What the hell is this? It’s all cloudy!’
It tastes different, it has a different aroma, and you
wonder what’s wrong with this beer. But now it’s accepted,
it’s grown in popularity, and people don’t even think twice
about it. Will the brett beers ever be volume products? No,
but it’s going to grow. I’m sure of it.”

There aren’t
many bug beers available in the Massachusetts market yet,
but you can bet that your savvy customers have heard of
them, and are looking for them. Talk to your wholesaler;
better yet, bug him about it.