Beauty and the Yeast

Brewers are using wild yeasts and fruit to create a rainbow assortment of new beers.

One hot and sultry July evening in Richmond (go figure), on my way to dinner at a trendy new Scott’s Addition location, I stopped at The Veil Brewing Co.—Richmond’s much acclaimed bastion of barley and hops—to wet the whistle. And what I saw in the brewery’s cavernous tasting room was somewhat stunning. The colors in the glasses on the tables defied logic. Instead of pint glasses of yellow, amber, and brown—lagers, ales, and stouts—I beheld goblets of regal colors—deep red, purple, pink, and gold. Some of the contents even appeared to be frozen. What was going on?

The next gen has gone mad for sour beers, that’s what.

Dirt Nap double IPA at The Veil.

_{Photo by Amber Parker / courtesy of The Veil}

The latest brewing trend to sweep the country actually originated centuries ago in the Old World. As beer fermented in wooden barrels or open-air vessels (known as coolships), inevitably incorporating microorganisms, wild yeast, and bacteria from barrel staves and the air, Belgian and German brewers developed an array of tart and tasty brews: sours. From the light and citrusy gose (pronounced “goes-uh”) and Berliner weisse to the complex and funky lambic and gueuze (a blend of lambics from different batches), all are tart, but they can present quite differently. Many have a secondary fermentation with fruit. 

In the past decade American brewers have been riffing off those traditional styles (call it Sour Beer 2.0), fermenting with wild yeasts—strains of which breweries cultivate and guard like dragons on gems—and bacteria, aging their brews in wood and/or stainless steel, and then laying them down on fresh fruit, like blueberries, blackberries, and peaches. Hence, the surprisingly bold color spectrum. 

I ordered a tasting of the sours on tap at The Veil that particular evening. First up, Never Never Mind Mind was described as a double plum gose, and I eyed the dense plum-colored concoction, which looked to me more like a fruit purée than a beer, with uncertainty. Gose, a style from Goslar, Germany, is a warm-fermented sour wheat beer made with coriander and salt (pink Himalayan sea salt in this case), ale yeast, and “lacto” (lactobacillus, a bacteria also found in yogurt). And like this one, it is typically now made by kettle-souring at high temperatures and can be done in a couple of weeks. 

I took a sip. It did, in fact, taste like a tart beer, not a smoothie, and was refreshingly crisp with overtones of plum but without the sweetness. And herein lies the beauty of wild yeasts, which are more virulent and gobble up all the sugars in the fruit: The beer has the flavor of the fruit but not the sweetness.  

The Veil’s Nick Walphall submerging organic Texas oranges.

_{Photo by Amber Parker / courtesy of The Veil}

Next up, I tasted Never More, a gose ale triple fruited with blackberry purée, and, getting even further out there, Piña Colada Tastee, a smoothie-style sour ale brewed with milk sugar, coconut cream, flaked coconut, and pineapple purée. Both are highly quaffable and, in season, can even be ordered frozen from the brewery’s slushy machine. I found I was quickly developing an appreciation for these complex and flavorful beers.  

But it was the final beer in the flight, a farmhouse- inspired beer, VAST: Five, that showed just how complex and artfully rendered these beers can be. VAST: Five is brewed with raw wheat and New Zealand hops and fermented for 14 months in oak barrels with The Veil’s signature house yeast culture, along with saison and Brett (Brettanomyces) strains. Fruited with raspberries and cherries, this strong ruby-red sour is then bottle-conditioned for six months to produce an intense fruit-forward beer with underlying tannins and funk, balanced by a snappy effervescence and tartness.

It should come as little surprise that The Veil has such a robust program of what it calls Mixed Fermie™ (short for mixed fermentation) beer. Head brewer and co-owner Matt Tarpey, who trained at two of the nation’s best breweries (The Alchemist and Hill Farmstead, both in Vermont), has an ongoing apprenticeship with Cantillon, a historic Belgian brewery famous for its traditional barrel-aged sour beers. 

Local foraged pawpaws ready to be made into beer at Fine Creek Brewing Company.

_{Photo courtesy of Fine Creek Brewing Company}

Fine Creek Brett Saison.

_{Photo courtesy of Fine Creek Brewing Company}

Peaches on their way to becoming beer at The Veil.

_{Photo by Amber Parker / courtesy of The Veil}

Tabol’s product line.

_{Photo by Jason Collins / courtesy of Tabol}

While wild-yeast brewing allows for a wide range of expressions and displays of artistry, it turns out that it is also high-stakes poker. Conventional beer yeasts, like those used to make a lager or IPA, have been cultivated to yield a controlled fermentation and consistent taste. But the wild yeasts spread easily and can contaminate an entire brewery.

Test pour.

_{Photo courtesy of Fine Creek Brewing Company}

When I called Nick Walphall, manager of the “wild” or “oak” program at The Veil, which doesn’t use the term “sour beer,” he asked me if I could call him back. He was in the Funkhaüst, a separate warehouse facility where the wild yeast beers are put in barrels, aged, blended, mixed with fruit, and packaged, and he was in the middle of processing 2,500 pounds of fresh Hanover County peaches, meaning he and four other workers were ripping them in half by hand and extracting the pits. “We use all whole fruit,” he told me. “Only real whole fruit. No processing.” It took them five hours. 

Tarpey and The Veil’s other senior brewer, Justin Anderson, brew all the base beers at their “clean” facility, where beers are made using conventional ale or lager yeast, also known as brewer’s yeast. “We put it into oak barrels and truck it over here,” says Walphall, who has been at The Veil since 2011, after stints at Hardywood in Richmond and Tired Hands in Ardmore, Pennsylvania. “Wild yeasts have the ability to consume every last bit of sugar,” meaning they can take over the place and get in all the barrels, which is why they have to be kept separate. 

“Once you enter the world of bacteria, things get a lot more complicated,” says Brian Mandville, head brewer at Fine Creek Brewing Company in Powhatan County, whose Dry Hopped Brett Saison took first place for American wild ale at the 2019 Virginia Craft Beer Cup. “I’d be lying if I told you it was something I didn’t worry about,” he says. Half of the brewery is used for clean beers and the other half for wild beers. They use separate tanks, clamps, valves, and packaging systems. “There are a lot of stringent cleaning and sanitation protocols, including not wearing the same clothes and shoes. A lot of cleaning the outside of everything. It’s difficult but not impossible.” 

And at Tabol, one of RVA’s newest breweries, they make nothing but wild farm ales. “House Tart Ale is keeping the lights on,” says co-founder Brandon Dise, who teamed up with brewer Nic Caudle because “some of the styles he was chasing were not available in town.” Caudle uses neighborhood yeasts, from rosebuds, honeysuckle (more tart and dry), or mulberry trees (more funky). They experiment a lot. “Twenty different flowers will give you 20 different results,” says Dise. 

Brian Mandville, brewer at Fine Creek Brewing.

_{Photo courtesy of Fine Creek Brewing Company}

“Just because it’s wild doesn’t mean it’s tart or funky,” says Dise. “Some are clean and mellow. Others are way out of left field. They smell like stinky blue cheese. They do their own dance.”

“This program has no time schedule,” The Veil’s Walphall says of his wilds. The beers average 13 months in barrels, but some will sit in oak for up to three years and in glass for another six months to a year. “We work with standard 225-liter barrels. Each barrel is its own individual ecosystem, and each will taste different.” Walphall and Tarpey will taste them all from month to month. Even though they come from the same base and the same culture, they may age differently. “If a barrel doesn’t make the cut,” says Walphall, “we’ll dump it down the drain, and we’ll sell that barrel.” 

“We look for balance,” he says. “We try to keep the acid profile back. We’re not trying to make the beer sour, just very expressive.” 

This they and their fellow craft brewers who dare to take a walk on the wild side are accomplishing with élan, attracting a whole new generation to the taps. 

This article originally appeared in our Drink 2019 issue.