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

The Spontaneous Files: Block 15 Brewing

Other posts in the series: De Garde and Solera

If you ever have a chance to sit with Nick Arzner in Block 15’s new taproom, I highly recommend it. Over the summer I sat with him drinking pints of Gloria!, the new pilsner he’d just released, and literally every person who came in the front doors stopped to chat with him. He greeted them with smiles and warm handshakes and then they traded stories of each other’s families. Nick was born in Oregon and his father coached the South Albany High School swimming team—I had the sense that personal and family connections bound Nick to nearly everyone in Corvallis. My guess is that they enjoy coming to the pub because it’s an affirmation of a local kid done good. I also had the sense that they had absolutely no idea how good that kid had done, or that they were visiting a brewery considered by many to be Oregon’s best.

Block 15 is currently famous for Sticky Hands, its booming double IPA. A half-decade ago, people doted on its stouts with similar affection. I have also considered them one of the premier saison breweries, and I discussed Ville de Provisions in The Beer Bible as one of the few to successfully mesh the expressive flavors of farmhouse and wild yeasts. Less attention is placed on Nick’s spontaneously-fermented ales, but I will happily entertain the argument that they’re his most accomplished beers.

Nick has always found inspiration in European beers, and you find winks and nods to the old countries—but especially Belgium—throughout the Block 15 realm. When he opened a bistro around the corner from the original brewpub, he named it Les Caves—a reference to the pub that sits across the road from Brasserie Dupont. Early on, he released a Belgian pale ale called “Wandelpad,” which referenced a walking path next to the monastery at Westvleteren (the beer itself was an evocation of the monks’ far less famous pale ale). And if you know how the lambic beers around Brussels are made, you might get the reference when you learn his spontaneously-fermented beers are in a line called “Turbulent Consequences.” (Get it? No? Read on.)

Underneath the original brewpub is a honeycomb of smaller and larger chambers that constitute Block 15’s barrel room. On the door of one you’ll find a circle of wood—a barrel head—hand painted with the words “Time does not respect those that do without it.” This is another homage to a similar circle hanging in Cantillon (“Le temps ne respecte pas ce qui se fait sans lui”). Beyond it is the brewery’s coolship, which is both deeper and less wide than typical examples. “When we started this program, I thought we’d just try it and I didn’t expect much out of it,” Nick explained. Hedging his bets, he designed to be extra deep “so we could use it for open ferments” in the case that the spontaneous ferments didn’t pan out.

Fortunately for all, they did.

Unlike Trevor Rodgers at De Garde, who has developed a new mashing regime for his spontaneous ales, Block 15 goes through the traditional, laborious mashing process. “We do it with a nod to the classical beers in the sense of sweating our asses off with a turbid mash and throwing in aged hops, and letting our environment do the work.” The turbid mash is a throwback to a time when local Belgian jurisdictions taxed breweries based on the size of their mash tuns, creating an irresistible incentive to keep them as small as possible. In order to work around undersized mash tuns, breweries developed convoluted mashing systems that survive among the lambic makers—and a few Americans who prize tradition. (It also prepares a wort that will feed Brettanomcyes for months or years as the beer ages.) Turbid mash, Turbulent Consequences—now you see the reference.

Nick begins with cold water and goes through six steps of pulling off part of the mash, warming it, and returning it to the main mash. The whole ordeal takes six hours. His process of inoculation is similar to lambic-brewing, but differs in a couple ways. He lowers the temperature of the wort a bit before putting it in the coolship, and then instead of leaving it just overnight, he lets it rest for a full 24 hours. There’s a lot of mysticism associated with coolships and their placement, and I consider Block 15’s an asterisk to the whole oeuvre. Rather than elevating it and opening louvers to bring in the currents of the fresh breeze, Block 15’s coolship is down in the cellar, exposed to very little fresh air. I suppose it’s a testament to the cleanliness of the barrel room that this does not introduce any nasty microorganisms, but for whatever the reason, Nick gets gentle, balanced beer from his blend of bugs.

So far, he has largely released fruited versions of these beers, and as we stood next to the (empty) coolship, we sipped on a spontaneous peach beer he’d bottled. I found it wonderfully gentle and approachable. The acidity was restrained, but electrified the peaches, which seemed somehow more intense than a perfectly ripe, sun-warmed fruit ever could. Nevertheless, he surprised me by saying, “if I had to be really critical of the program, I wish it wasn’t so zingy. The more mature my palate gets, the more I like balanced acidity, and in the rest of our programs we can balance them. But I do allow this to express itself. It’s an expression of our, of our, of our…”—he struggled for the right word before ending, with a laugh, on “basement.”

When a brewery works with wild yeast and bacteria, blending becomes a pivotal skill. Different barrels produce different flavors, some fruity, some acidic, some woody, some even harsh. The best wild ales are a product of blending these different elements to create a complex and harmonious beer. “I used to do a lot with taking pH, gravity, but I do it all through sensory now. I don’t give a damn what the pH is or the gravity is; what I care about is: how does the beer taste, how does it smell, how does it feel?” Whether we’re talking about the Turbulent Consequence line or other wild beers, this is where Nick really shines. Blending is something like cooking, knowing how flavors will work together, and for Nick it appears instinctive. It probably also takes a bit of steely pragmatism: some of the spontaneous beer just isn’t good. Up to 20% of these beers don’t make the cut and end up in the drain. Such is the risk when you turn your wort over to nature.

We tend to think of spontaneous beers as products entirely of what happens in the coolship, but I’ve now heard from a couple people that there’s more to it than that. Frank Boon has his pilsner malt prepared to his own specifications. Nick doesn’t go that far, but like Boon he disputes that everything happens in the coolship. “That can’t be true. For our spontaneous ferment we use Rahr white wheat—that’s my wheat. If you use whatever—unmalted wheat—it’s different. That’s a difference right there, and it’s gotta come through in the end regardless of what’s going on down here [in the coolship]. So then, can you separate those things, the way I do my turbid mash, which is going to be different than the way anyone else does a turbid mash. How much of that translates to this barrel? Some, there’s got to be some.” I told him about Boon’s specially-malted pilsner malt and he agreed. “So if Boon were to come here and brew here and bring his pilsner malt and use his techniques, his beer wouldn’t taste the same.”

I suggested that he and Trevor Rogers at De Garde swap breweries for a day, preparing their wort the way they normally do, but fermenting in the opposite location. Would a wort prepared by Trevor in Corvallis taste like a De Garde beer, a Block 15 beer, or something else? A Block 15 wort inoculated in Tillamook? How much is the ingredients, the mash, or the wild yeast and bacteria? It would be a fascinating experiment—and perhaps one day they’ll run it.

In the meantime, watch Block 15’s website for announcements of the Turbulent Consequence line. Block 15 will release a blend of 18-month-old barrels conditioned with cranberries called The Bog on December 3rd.  They are an example of a growing number of spontaneous American ales, and they’re some of the best.

Photo of Block 15's "Respect" sign: The New School

The Spontaneous Files: De Garde Brewing

 Other posts in the series: Block 15 and Solera

This past summer, I got sent on assignment to write a piece for Travel Oregon about breweries using native yeasts. The article didn't allow me to say much about the practices of these breweries, so I'm expanding on what I learned here. 

One of the most interesting breweries in Oregon--and the US for that matter--is a little place nestled in a mist-veiled valley near Tillamook. Named De Garde after the French practice of aging beer ("garde" is something like "lager"), it might have been more appropriate to call it "Wild House" or something, for the signature feature of the brewery is that every beer begins life soaking in the ambient yeasts and bacteria in the brewery's cool ship. It is no longer wildly uncommon for breweries to make spontaneously-fermented beers or even to have an on-site coolship. But rare is the brewery that exclusively makes them. I visited last August and had a wonderful tour with Trevor Rodgers, one half of the dynamic duo who run things (along with his wife, Linsey), and learned quite a bit about their practices.

Brewery
Most of the excitement happens later in the process, but building a wort that can nurture wild yeast and bacteria is a critical first step. “Our brewhouse is very rudimentary, a dual-kettle system, indirect fire [system],” Trevor explained. “We’re looking for a very starch- and protein-rich wort for a lot of our beers. For the base for that particular beer, the lambic-inspired base, we want a lot of starch and a lot of protein coming.”

In Belgian lambic-making, brewers do this long, complicated process called a "turbid mash." The goal is to create a nutrient-poor wort that is rich in dextrins and starches. Lambics go through a strangely bipolar ferment. At first, brewers are trying to inhibit things ("things" begin the harsher spoilage bacteria that can ruin a wort) and encourage a slow but healthy initial ferment. But they also want to leave something for the Brettanomyces to chew on later in the process. So it's a starve-the-now-and-feed-them-later approach.

Trevor started experimenting with turbid mashes, but switched to a radical approach that left my jaw hanging open when he described it. He trotted by the process so quickly I had to back up a few sentences and ask him to repeat what he does now. Since it is so unusual, he asked that I not broadcast it to the world, but ask about it if you visit the brewery. Now that De Garde has had a chance to see what longer-aged beer does with the wort, Trevor's satisfied that it is a fine substitute for the traditional approach. (We don't want to get too deeply into the weeds, but that "traditional" approach originally emerged from the way local jurisdictions taxed breweries, so it's reasonable to think alternate methods might be fine for creating the right kinds of worts.)


Inoculation

Most places on the planet are not suited for year-round spontaneous fermentation. During the summer, the temperatures are too high and the wort spends too long in a microbe-friendly warmth. During the summer there are also more microbes about. The result is spoilage, and it was so common that Europeans didn't brew during the summer (and many local governments banned it). Tillamook, by contrast, is one of those places that never gets very warm, so De Garde is a 12-month brewery. “That’s why we pursued the Oregon Coast—as the likely place to have success, given that it is temperate year-round.” Indeed, I visited not long after the hottest day ever recorded in Tillamook, and it still got down to 52 (11 C) overnight. (They didn't brew that day.) But neither does it get icy in the winter; it's a perfect Goldilocks zone of just-right.

A lot of the romance of spontaneous fermentation is vested in the activity of the coolship, but we know more about wild yeasts now, and realize this is only one part of the process. Trevor emphasized that point to me:

“I think there’s a misconception that all the beer’s inoculation is coming from the air, from outside, whereas realistically, most of the inoculates are coming from the brewhouse environment itself. What we look for is a resupply of enteric bacteria from the outside environment because they don’t do as well in even a modestly clean brewhouse environment. They’re essential to get complexity of character. Those early off, you know phenols and characteristics that are undesirable are later broken down and reformulated into something that’s a lot more pleasant and complex. You can get sacch, brett, lacto, and pedio from the brewhouse environment, but you need refreshment regularly coming through.”

Aging
De Garde is located in a large industrial building, the majority of which is dedicated to barrel storage. It's so large, in fact, that De Garde can afford to keep the barrel stacks low for a more consistent temperature. Again, Tillamook's location is perfect for this: it is consistently 55-60 degrees (13-16C) in the warehouse, which requires no climate control (except the coastal breeze). As we stood in the barrel room, I tried to lure Trevor into talking about his approach and philosophy, which is so critical to making these beers. His answer surprised me.

“Our biggest challenge as a natural, wild brewer is to restrain acidity. It’s going to be there, and you need some for the complexity, but it needs to be in balance. It’s like the hops arms race—we are in that phase. The demand for sour beer makes people think sour is good. Like hops are good; bitterness is good. But that shouldn’t be the defining feature of a beer. It should be an element that is essential to produce complexity—not the element defining the beer.”

For me, this is actually the most important element of De Garde's house palate. When the first De Garde beers were released, they weren't restrained at all; some were viciously tart. But recently they have come into remarkable harmony. It's actually no surprise that it's taken the brewery a little time to dial these in--it's a bigger surprise that they managed to do it so fast.


Trevor continued:

“We’re not masters of anything. We make wort, we don’t make beer. That’s very different; we’ve relinquished control for the most part. The one thing we do control is what goes into the barrel, and what gets blended from the barrel. But even after that, because it’s naturally reconditioned in the keg and bottle, you have zero control. I didn’t have any gray hairs when I started,” he said with a laugh (I still didn't see too many). “The taste from that barrel, the complex Brettanomyces interaction, the gentle acidity, you can’t replicate that by adding ingredients into beer, by pitching five dozen different strains of Brettanomyces—it takes a natural interaction.”

De Garde makes  a number of different kind of beers, from their shorter-aged "Berliner weisses" (which are unlike others of their kind), saisons, aged beers and aged fruit beers. My favorites are the ones that have been aged longer and have more layered complexity. They share a similar configuration of flavors you find in Belgian lambics, but they would never be mistaken for them. I don't know what role the native yeasts and bacteria play in this, or whether it has to do with that strange mashing regime or the way they're aged or what, but they are singular. Perhaps one day we will speak of a "coastal" terroir.

Tillamook's about an hour and a half drive from Portland, which make for an ambitious beer outing. The drive is beautiful, though, and if you like complex, balanced, barrel-aged wild ales, it's well worth the time.

"Sour" Beers, Craft's Dark Secrets, and Yeast--Three Interesting Stories

August is reliably the deadest month on the calendar. The excitement of summer has passed, but no one wants to confront all these Oktoberfest releases the marketing people are trying to promote. True to form, this August started slow, but there have been a few recent articles out there that piqued my interest. I think you'll have thoughts as well.

1. The New York Times Botches "Sour" Beers
Eric Asimov, the wine writer for the Times, has offered more misleading, confusing information about beer to more people than anyone on earth. I know he's an astute guy with a great palate, but for some reason, beer is so far beneath him he can't actually be bothered to report it properly. Last week he did a round up of "sour beers," and made a predictable hash in framing it. I don't mind particularly that he combined every tart style, from gose to lambic, in one category. In sensory evaluation, it's fine to blend categories of like beers. But then he writes this, and my patience evaporates:

Many of these characteristics are a result of a brewing process seemingly derived as much from wine as from beer, in which the beers are aged in barrels after fermentation. As they rest, they undergo additional transformations as bacteria like lactobacillus and pediococcus interact with the beer, contributing lively acidity as well as tart flavors and increased complexity. Some are vintage dated.

And:

My guess is that few commercial sour-beer brewers choose to allow the sort of spontaneous fermentations that shape Belgian lambics. More likely, they are inoculating their brews with selected yeast strains, including brettanomyces, anathema to winemakers as it can be the source of funky flavors great and small. If unwanted in wine, it can be great in beer styles like gueuze, a Belgian blend of young and old unflavored lambics.

Ugh. To make explicit the crimes here: 1) in the first paragraph, he conflates the production of beers like gose (kettle soured) with barrel-aged beers. Goses (and most Berliner weisses) do not spend months in barrels. People are confused enough about this already; there's an entire debate raging about the cheat of making "quick sour" beers that's fueled entirely by ignorance about style and technique. Asimov inadvertently feeds this. 2) In graf two, he reveals that he's never even bothered to pick up a phone to inquire how the beers he's evaluating are made. Are some breweries inoculating while others are using spontaneous fermentation? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯  It's a mystery!

(Asimov's favorite beer was Cascade's Kriek, and he loved it. He also admired a Logsdon beer. So I can't be too disappointed in him, I guess.)

2. Craft Beer's Dark Secrets
An article on Thrillist has gotten a ton of attention as an anonymous insider ("someone who's worked in the industry for six years and currently works in marketing for a well-known brewery") dishes on all the terribleness happening in craft. I have seen it reposted quite a bit with nods of acknowledgement. (Stan, for example: "Many of the points are valid. That some are less valid does not invalidate the story.") It's a pretty long laundry list of stuff, so I'll skip trying to pull representative quotes. A lot of the observations are anodyne or wrong (competition is increasing; consolidation is happening; there's a bubble), but there are others that are more serious and potentially accurate: working brewers get paid badly; the beer world is sexist; jobs in beer are hard and pay badly.

The big problem I have is that we have no idea from where these "secrets" emerge. The beer industry employs hundreds of thousands of people, and it follows that individual experiences vary widely. Some breweries are great to work for, while others are Dickensian hell. What does this tell us about "craft beer?" General, anonymous statements supported by anecdote are rumor, not fact or even reportage. I would bet my life that there are dark secrets in craft brewing--we already know about pay-to-play, as one example--and I would love to read a serious report, backed by numbers and on-the-record accounts. This is not that report--reader beware.

3. Yeast, the "God Particle"
Jason Notte has another excellent piece out, this time on the yeasty Dave Logsdon (founder of Wyeast Labs as well as the yeast-forward Logsdon Farmhouse Ales). You should go read the whole article, but one graf jumped off the page to me. This is Logsdon talking about his spontaneous program.

We’ve let those go spontaneously and haven’t tried to isolate and identify them. I don’t see a need to anymore. After spending a career in a laboratory, one of the things I wanted to do was get away from the strict, stringent protocol that was necessary. Even though we have a lab here and do our testing and stuff, it’s done on a more as-needed basis than a controlled management. With the 10 strains we do manage, I’m experienced enough to know what the right protocol is. 

I have written about this before, but there's something very, very different about inoculating wort with wild yeast and letting beer make itself spontaneously. The end results, so similar a NYT columnist can't distinguish them, belie the huge act of will it takes to get out of the way and let nature take its course. Dave has spent a career corralling and controlling yeast. It's a testament to the life transition he experienced when he put down the test tubes at Wyeast and installed a coolship. It may look like an obvious step, but I think it was anything but.