Vignette 38: Brian Coombs of Alesong Brewing & Blending
Brian Coombs is at right, with co-founders Matt Van Wyk (L) and Doug Coombs (M). Photo: Alesong Brewing and Blending
This series, picking up after a couple years, features the words of brewers as they discuss the beer they make. Today we hear from Alesong's Brian Coombs, who spoke to me about the brewery's experiments with wild fruit inoculations. It's a rare practice I wrote about in Craft Beer and Brewing. See past posts in the series here.
In a rare form of spontaneous fermentation, brewers use fresh fruit to inoculate their wort. It’s similar to the process of natural fermentation in wine or cider-making, when the yeast and bacteria resident on the fruit’s skin ferment the juice. They have experimented with this at Alesong, and Brian Coombs offered these thoughts.
“We’re getting a much better yeast character and a healthier ferment when we get fruit from our neighbors at King Estate because they’re totally biodynamic. My theory is that there’s a yeast cell count issue on [a lot of fruit], because they’re picked, and then they’re refrigerated, and then they’re shipped to us, as opposed to just getting picked that morning and put into beer that afternoon.”
“The riper [the fruit] is, you’re getting ferments that are starting right away. That’s what the yeast and bacteria like. That’s when the birds start to eat it, and that’s when the insects come out and all these things. Nature is showing us these fruits are in their optimum time right when they’re ripe. The more time the fruit spends on the bush or the tree as its ripening, the more organisms are going to be there. If it’s picked super early and there’s not a ton of sugar in the fruit, there’s just no reason for the yeast and bacteria to be there.”
“Your quality of fruit matters so much. It comes through in the flavor and it comes through in the fermentation. Your tub of raspberry puree that’s a conglomerate of a ton of different fruit is going to be different [than] if you go to a single producer and select what fruit. We do that with hops. We understand that with hops. (Granted, production is much easier if you’re using a bucket of puree!)”
“Especially with spontaneous ferments, if something starts to go acetic or whatever, you can catch that early and you can fix it. A common thing is for something to go reductive. You need to get that off the fruit and introduce some sort of oxygen. The throw-the-fruit-into-the-barrel-and-forget-about-it technique works sometimes, and it can make some great beer sometimes, but if you want the beer to be awesome more guaranteed, pay attention to it.”