The Spontaneous Files: Solera Brewery

Other posts in the series: De Garde and Block 15

I finish up my discussion of spontaneous fermentation with Solera Brewery, which sits on the hem of Mount Hood as it spreads out toward the Columbia Gorge. It is less than an hour and a half from downtown Portland, has one of the prettiest settings in the state, and consistently produces some of the best beer I've ever tasted--seriously--and yet still it remains a little-visited destination for beer fans. I'm often mystified by this, but all the more so since I've just come back from Hill Farmstead, a similar brewery that Bostonians and New Yorkers regularly trek to, with drives of 3.5 and 6.5 hours respectively. And, pretty as Northern Vermont is, nothing beats the view from Solera.

Well, it is a bit more rustic than Hill Farmstead, and it's a much smaller brewery. You can't visit and stock up (their beer is all draft) or enjoy a range of three dozen offerings on tap or in the bottle. You take what they're serving and, because brewer Jason Kahler follows the seasons, the taplist is as mutable as the whether outside the back of the pub. Unlike at Hill Farmstead, if there's a beer you really want to taste, you may have to wait awhile. But then, you'll never want for good beer, either.

Jason does all beer styles well, but his uncategorizable (but instantly recognizable) range of saisons and tart ales are the real show-stoppers. At one spring stop a couple years back--I think it was actually when I took that photo above--he had two saisons that both qualified as among the best I'd ever tasted. They were, like so many beers in this cohort, kissed by wildness. They weren't all the way tart (certainly not sour), and a casual fan might not even have noticed the wild yeasts that added a layer of crisp definition. But that wildness is his calling card--in fact it's even there in the name.

While he was working as a brewer for other places around Hood River, Kahler practiced a kind of wild brewing that is becoming more popular. In his home basement, he had different vessels (none wooden) filled with wild ales. He used these in blends and then topped off the partially-emptied barrels with fresh wort, keeping the colonies of wild microorganisms alive. This is the "solera" system of the brewery's name (though it's not quite like the more famous solera systems used to make sherry and vinegar). As a commercial brewer, he continues to embrace the wild side, though his preferred form of inoculation is fruit, not coolship.

A bottle of homebrewed solera beer
Kahler shared on my first visit.

Parkdale is in the heart of Oregon's tree-fruit growing region, and Kahler takes full advantage of the bounty. “I’d hover around two pounds per gallon as a good jumping off point,” he says, by way of explaining the process. “One thing to consider is the acidity of the fruit. That plays a big role. The more acidic it is, the more it comes through in the beer.”

Being local means he can form relationships with growers and get the fruit exactly like he wants it. “What’s great about that is he can let the fruit hang until I want it and he picks them without the stems on them. The only thing I want to get rid of from the fruit is the stem. I don’t cull the fruit. In fact, often I’ll get what they call ‘number 2s’ or higher. Those fruits will generally go to juicing or canning—they might have a blemish on them. They let them hang longer so the brix are very high. That’s important, flavor-wise, for aromatics.”

My impulse to talk to these breweries in the first place was an article for Travel Oregon in which I tried to elicit how the "terroir" of wild yeast might affect the beer. The only person who was willing to edge up to that description was Jason. "We don't have a language for these kinds of beer," he began. “You can get Brettanomyces from the laboratory and you can get Brett from the air. I love Brettanomyces, I love Lactobacillus, Pedio. They’re all there in the air; you don’t need to buy them. If you’re buying them from a lab, you’re really trying to control the process, you’re trying to drive the end result. You’re not embracing your terroir—which I’m a big fan of. You should just embrace what you have.”

Source: Solera Brewery

In my forthcoming homebrew book I have a chapter about how to inoculate with fruit, and Kahler was the one who conveyed that information. I don't want to reveal too much about that, but here are a couple tidbits. The valleys around Parkdale have substantially different elevations, and I wondered whether that affected how the fermentation went. It did. Solera brewers once ran an experiment where they tried inoculation with apples that were taken from close proximity but at different elevations and one of them (for whatever reason, the info about which one is not on my audio tape) didn't take off. That illustrates how hyper-local this kind of brewing is. If a different brewery were to use fruit from the Willamette Valley or east of the Cascades, they would find their fruit covered with different microorganisms (Or, at least, different proportions of them.)

One thing I've found in talking with these brewers is that they have a certain kind of Zen ease about this process. Many brewers do wonderful wild ales with pitched yeast, but they don't want the chaos of randomness in their brewhouse. In different ways, each of the brewers doing spontaneous fermentation shrugged it off. Here's how Kahler put it. "Getting back to philosophy," Kahler told me, "that’s something that you have to get over, your fear, if you’re going to try these beers. You can’t lose sleep over something like this.”

I'd even take it a step further. Having interviewed a number of brewers who make beer this way, I've found something else they all share: curiosity. This kind of brewing is not predictable. It's not reproducable, not consistent. It's certainly not speedy. In order to forgo those qualities--which are critical in most breweries--you have to take joy in the unpredictable. You have to find the prospect of turning your wort over to unknown forces a kind of delightful gamble. You will certainly find that nature has returned you something weird or gross from time to time--you can't prevent it. But sometimes it will also give you an unexpectedly sublime ale, something you didn't expect and couldn't even have imagined.  That is the promise of brewing spontaneously, and it takes a certain kind of person to pursue it.

John Hitt (L) and Jason Kahler (R), co-owners of
Solera Brewery. Source: The New School

Spring in the Gorge

On Saturday, I pried myself away from the computer to head down the gorge for the first annual Hard Pressed Cider Fest just outside Hood River.  The location was a fruit warehouse in the middle of acres and acres of rolling orchards in bloom.  I'm still in super slo-mo on blogging as I enter the final two weeks of book-writing (about cider, so I justified the trip as "research"), so you just get pictures. 

Hood-san rises above the flowery scene.

A nice western swing/country band serenaded fest-goers. (Cider is more
country than beer.)

The view from the fest.

When you get to within ten miles of Parkdale, Solera is a must.

Meet the New Brewery: Solera

The word Solera sounds vaguely Spanish and when used as a proper name reminds one of a luxury automobile or a sleeping pill.  In fact, it actually refers to a process, one worth spending a few sentences explaining.  It's a barrel-aging system used in wine, liquor (sherry, madeira, port) and vinegar production.  In liquors and vinegar, it's mainly a way of blending different vintages.  The blender has a series of casks, and at the end of a period of, say a year, he will remove some liquor from the final and oldest cask.  He replaces the removed liquor with liquor from the next oldest cask, and on down the line to the youngest cask, to which he will introduce new liquor.  In one variant, whisky producers replace volume lost to evaporation.  The process is similar in beer, with one huge difference: the goal is not only aging, but cultivating native yeast cultures within the barrels.  Brewers can blend beers from their soleras or just pull beer out straight and add wort.  It's pretty obscure, but Nick Arzner at Block 15 is using a solera to make his Caves Saison.

At the moment, Parkdale's newest brewery is sans solera--but we'll get to that in due course.  Let's talk about what it has, first.  It's the newest project of Jason Kahler, who was most recently at Big Horse down the road in Hood River.  Before that he was at Walking Man and Full Sail and before that, he was getting his brewing start in Duluth, MN at a place called Fitger's.  He's joined by partner John Hitt, a homebrewer with a background in biology and business--who's also a homebrewer.

Kahler took the helm at Big Horse a few years back and turned Hood River's red-headed stepchild into a place worth visiting.   He didn't often get to uncork wild yeast experiments, but when he did they were always impressive.  Hop fans know him for Vernon the Rabbit-Slayer, one of the most accomplished fresh hop ales and an annual fave.  But Big Horse, which has had a constant stream of brewers over the years, is not a final destination.  Jason was never going to follow his bliss making standard pale ales and stouts for a tourist brewpub.

Instead, he relocated 17 miles south in the wide spot in the road known as Parkdale, an unincorporated village of about 200.  The center of town is adorned by a 75-year-old theater that was, fifteen years ago, converted into the Eliot Glacier brewpub.  When the owners retired, they put the place on the block--brewery, building, and insane view of Mt. Hood (8 miles distant)--for a song.  Still, Parkdale's really remote, and it sat for the better part of two years before Jason and John decided to buy it.  They gave the 7-barrel system a scrub down and flipped the switch and about six weeks ago threw the doors open to the public.  

Beer and Brewing

To understand Solera's future, we look into Jason's past--and basement.  For years and years, even while he worked at different commercial breweries, Jason was conducting extensive experiments with soleras at home.  He now has something on the order of 20 in different sizes, which I take it his wife is a saint to tolerate.  He's also experimented with spontaneous fermentation, blending the results with the beer from the soleras.  Those form the research for projects he plans to continue at the new place, and he's currently looking for barrel space at warehouses around the area--the brewery building is far too small for a barrel room.  He even plans to convert the salad bar into a coolship and experiment with spontaneous fermentation out back.  It's hard to imagine a better place: the valleys around the brewery are forested in orchards, so the wild yeast ought to be healthy and dense. 

The first batch from Jason Kahler's private solera project.

In the meantime, he's making a range of eclectic ales roughly in the Gigantic mode--two standards and everything else rotating in and out.  Because it's Oregon, one standard is an IPA.  (As with Pints, Solera has no hops contract, so Jason has to work with hops he can find.  The current recipe uses the Zythos blend and Cascades and is lemony and thick.  I wouldn't be shocked to see it evolve.)  The other standard is far more unlikely: a 3%, sharply acidic Berliner weisse. 

What's amazing is the story of how it became a standard ale.  Solera may one day have the volume to send beer around the area, but it depends on local clientele.  And locals are principally hard working folks, not Portland hipsters and beer geeks.  Nevertheless, when Jason put Berliner Weisse on, they loved it.  This is pretty remarkable; when Full Sail put on a Berliner weisse at the Pilsner Room, it got geek admiration, but didn't move.  It's huge in Parkdale, though, so Solera will keep it on tap for them.  When they can, that is--and indeed, I had the misfortune of visiting on a day it was out.

The beer goes through a two-week lactic fermentation.  Jason experimented with different yeasts for the alcohol fermentation--German ale, lager, and saison.  Interestingly, the saison really didn't work; since saisons can have many qualities in common with Berliner weisses--wheat, tart character--you'd expect a fine marriage, but no.   The German ale strain, predictably, is the best fit.

Jason's also got a Grisette (4%) on tap and a stronger saison, both of which were delightful.  The Grisette, slightly phenolic and menthol-y with the French farmhouse yeast, is a perfect summer refresher.  He had on a pale made with no bittering hops--everything came in at about 15 minutes, and to get the BUs, that meant massive hopping.  These are not destined to last, of course, so you just have to visit to see what's on tap.  Oh, and Solera plans to make use of the local fruit bounty--look for ciders this fall. 

I hope John and Jason coordinate with Dave Logsdon and Charles Porter down the road at Logsdon Farmhouse Ales.  The two are just six miles apart and would make a drive out the Gorge a must for beer pilgrims.  They share a lot in common philosophically, too.  We have the makings of our own Senne Valley right here in Oregon.

As always, a few more pics below the fold.