Beer gets wild: ‘We are looking for barnyard, funky flavours’

Most of the beers we drink are fermented using bought-in brewer’s yeast, relying on hops to add flavour. For some, however, it is all about yeasts. Brewers including Canvas, Lineman, Land & Labour, Wide Street, Otterbank and Kinnegar, using mixed culture fermentations made up of saccharomyces (brewer’s yeast), lactobacillus and/or pediococcus (both lactic acid bacteria) and the wild yeast brettanomyces, are experimenting with wild and spontaneous fermentations, usually in barrels.

The beers are extraordinary. Some ferment spontaneously, using the microbes floating around in the air, to ferment their brews. It is a costly process as barrels must be imported, beers need to be aged for up to three years, and some simply go off.

“It’s another world, largely undiscovered,” says Mark Lucey from Lineman. “In the mid-20th century, wild yeasts were seen as a bad idea, and apart from the guys in Belgium, people kept them out. Now they are inviting them back in again. You get aromas of sour cherry, stone fruits and tropical flavours. They tend to be quite dry beers. It’s a niche market; some love it, others find it strange.”

The first Lineman beer was Saga, made using Kviek, a yeast derived from Norwegian farmhouse beers, which he got from an eastern European home brewer.

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Wide Street Brewing in Ballymahon, Co Longford, are specialists in mixed and wild fermentations. “We started off with mixed cultures in stainless steel, a bold move as it takes six months and you are blocking so many tanks,” says Carla Naltchayan. Now we are obsessed with wood.”

“We are looking for barnyard, funky flavours. Young mixed fermentation beer is fruity with peach and melon aromas; after a year it goes barnyardy and then the wood brings in oaky, complex flavours. It has a completely different dimension to standard beers.”

They have started their first spontaneous fermentation. “We love this idea; you cannot get any more local, with unique microflora. It is our terroir.” They have a mixed fermentation saison ageing in Chardonnay barrels, from Burgundy – “the two flavours really work well”. That will be ready for autumn, and lots more for Christmas, she says.