If you’re new to this approach of fermenting and aging in a large format wooden vessel, the main idea is to brew up a wort that is really going to let the yeast and microbes shine. With the help of Ira from Noble Creature we’ve been working on pulling all house wild and mixed cultures together for a fun integration of all our house flavors. Some of these cultures have been propagated over the years off local flowers, fruit, and some commercial cultures and blending them with some of our favorite cultures from our breweries. We spent 3 days brewing and filling this 30bbl (930 gallon) Foeder Crafters vessel with a rich and starchy wort for these microbes to work on over the coming years. We want to produce a very dextrinous wort with long chain sugars and plenty of starches that the saccharomyces yeast can’t fully ferment into alcohol.

The remaining sugars and starches will continue to be consumed and transformed by the rest of the wild yeast and bacteria that will blend over time to create all of the wild, fruity, and funky flavors we’ve all come to love in these styles of beer. In addition, we’ll be utilizing this foeder in the solera style to add additional complexity over the years. The idea behind the solera method is that we’ll fill up the foeder with the first batch of beer and then pull just a portion off the vessel. This will be the initial beer released unblended. Then we will top the tank up with a fresh batch and the next beer will be a blend of the original beer that has been aging and a younger, fresher beer that hasn’t spent as much time in oak. We’ll continue to pull different amounts off the foeder and topping it up to have an ongoing blend of various ages of wild mixed culture beer. And so it goes… This will continue to evolve over the years and is a really fun project for all of us involved to see how this blend evolves over time.

The #foeder4food collaboration project will provide support to local food banks, shelters, and/or food related non-profit organizations feeding hungry families in our three counties.