Breweries from the Pacific Northwest and around the country poured diligently crafted beer at the 2019 Portland Farmhouse and Wild Ale Festival over the weekend. Eugene breweries Alesong Brewing and Blending and Freehand Brewing made the trip north to pour their wild beers.
A wild ale uses different yeasts to ferment rather than what most commercial beers are made with. Brettanomyces yeast, commonly called “brett,” can make a beer fruitier, tart and “funky” when it is used to ferment. Another common way to make wild ales is with lactobacillus bacteria — a “good bacteria” that can make beers sour.
Brewers debate about what a wild ale is: Some say it’s only wild if they open their casks to the air and let whatever yeast or bacteria is in the air ferment the beer. The process is called spontaneous fermentation, something Alesong brewer Matt Van Wyk doesn’t currently do but said he is looking into.
“When you use brett, even if you buy it from a lab, which we do, it still has some unpredictability to it, like a wild mustang,” Van Wyk said. “I call beers that I put brett and or lactobacillus, which makes it sour, wild beers.”
A farmhouse ale means it’s literally brewed on the farm using some or all ingredients grown on site. This is a broad category, which means flavors can be wide ranging, but many farmhouse ales are made using artisanal techniques such as barrel aging and blending with multiple beers.
Alesong poured on Friday and Saturday of the three-day weekend event. On Friday, they poured “Touch of Brett Mandarina,” a light barrel-aged beer, dry hopped with mandarina hops and then blended. A dry hopped beer has hops added after the beer ferments, which allows the flavor of the hops to come out without adding bitterness. And when Alesong blends beers, they mix various batches of beer that might be more tart or sweet to make a combination of exactly what they were imagining.
“Because we age in barrels, there’s a lot of variability and not as much consistency every time you pick up a beer,” Van Wyk said. “Because every barrel has its own personality and what comes out of it, we’re doing a lot of blending to get that consistency. Just like drinking wine, vintage to vintage, you get some differences.”
They also poured a beer called “visions,” which was fermented with brett yeast and lactobacillus and then bottle conditioned with muscat grape juice. To bottle condition, brewers at Alesong pour the beer in a bottle and then add the juice and some yeast; the yeast then consumes the sugars from the juice and its by-product is carbon, which ultimately carbonates the brew and gives the bubbly beer feel. Some brewers just add sugar to the top, but the grape juice adds some wine qualities to this special brew.
Freehand also poured Friday and Saturday: Their Friday bottle was called “Mods,” a blended, barrel-aged beer made with mixed cultures that ends up fairly tart. Their Saturday pours were “Verse,” a lightly sweet wild ale, and “Prims,” a wild Flemish red ale. All three of these can be found in bottle shops around Eugene including The Bier Stine, Sundance Market and their ilk.
Alesong’s saturday pours included a kriek (cherry) wild ale that tasted like dark cherries, was sweet and tart, and had a dry finish. But the stand out beer they poured was called “Friend in Commons,” a two-year barrel-aged and dry-hopped collaboration they did with a Portland brewery: Commons. Commons shut down about a year ago, but Alesong had stored and blended the beer so now they could share it with Portlanders who miss Commons. The beer was light, crisp and incredibly refreshing.
This beer and Alesong’s two Friday beers are extremely limited and might be impossible to find again — which adds to the romance of brewing: When such a situational and ingredient-oriented beer is finished, it is lost to history. Many of the breweries at the festival were pouring these kinds of exclusive, single-batch beers, making the event a special opportunity for those who buy into the mystique of wild brewing. Sometimes the beers can turn too odd because of what the yeasts and bacteria do, but sometimes the combinations of barrel-aging, exotic fruits, wild yeasts and blending of multiple casks can make a truly unique beverage.
