I am sure many of you listened to the Jester King’s spontaneous fermentation broadcast a few nights ago. Really a neat presentation!! The question I had was if they added any other yeast to the wort or just wild funk from the air do all of the work? She mentioned developing their own culture, but I missed if there was a “base” yeast in there as well. Also, I really liked the end where she talked about there being no wrong way to brew and to not get caught up in a certain process. Play around!! Any thoughts would be great…
They were on the Sunday Session last week - pretty good interview on there too… On there, they said that they steam sanitize barrels they use. They said they strive to make the fermentation as entirely “natural/wild/spontaneous” as possible. They acknowledged that even with steaming the barrels it is likely some “bugs” survive deeper in the wood, however, probably in low enough quantity to be a driving force in any fermentation.
I’ve seen Jester King give a lot of different explanations for their mixed culture that contradict. The only info I’ve seen repeated with any consistency came from their former head brewer who claimed to have put together the culture. I assume he would know best what is in it.
Their early saisons were just 3711. Their early sour beers were isolated lacto and brett from wort they left out at the brewery. Over time the 3711 culture became infected. Eventually they decided to steer into the skid and added their local lacto/brett to the 3711 along with dregs from Fantome and Cantillon (possibly others as well). This became their house culture for everything that isn’t coolshipped.
interesting. I’ve become skeptical at all the success every brewery seems to have with a coolship and spontaneously fermented beers. Open air cooling and fermenting in fresh barrel seems like it would have an enormous incident of failure, yet so many breweries are claiming to be having great success with it. I dunno, not calling anyone a Bull***t artist or anything, just seems like the rates of failure should be higher.
I should clarify that their SPON beers are coolshipped and do not receive any help from their house culture. I heard/read they dump 20-25% of their coolshipped barrels so there is definitely a degree of failure in the process. However, it’s the way beers were cooled until the advent of refrigeration and the way more than just lambic has been inoculated throughout history. The problem is not reaching fermentation but getting a good flavor out of the process. Blending goes a long way to make that possible.
That said, how many breweries out there have active coolship programs going on? I know many coolships are being installed around the country but I’m not aware of that many that have successfully produced beer yet.
Their house culture has some local elements to it–both intentionally and unintentionally–but it’s also “local” to Soy and Brussels, Belgium. I’m not hateful that their house culture includes commercial strains and dregs from other brewers. It’s true of my house cultures as well. I dislike that they sometimes refer to it as locally sourced when that’s not really the case.
I was also only referring to Spon beers in reference to their discussion on The Session. They also seemed to relate that the spontaneously fermented beers were hit and miss, with many not coming out - or one dimensional on their own. Some of the comments from the BN folks on the podcast also seemed to indicate that they really did not like the single variants they were sampling, but the blended products of Spon came together well.
They also discussed the labeling of Spon as “Methode Gueze” and the idea that they wanted honesty in process of a beer that was truly spontaneously fermented and blended from years worth of barrels, as opposed to something that is kettle soured, pitched with a known yeast and cranked out in a fairly short time.