The latest craft-brewing craze is the very definition of Champagne tastes on a beer budget, writes Michael Donaldson.
Pete Gillespie of Garage Project calls it an illicit tryst. The Ministry for Primary Industries asked about its legality. Other people just call it lunacy. We’re talking about the latest deviation in the craft beer world – beer-wine hybrids. Think of it as the Cronut of beverages, a mash-up that creates something better than the sum of its parts.
‘‘I’ve genuinely lost count of how many we’ve done now,’’ Gillespie says of the grape-grain fusions produced at the Wellington brewery. ‘‘I call it an illicit tryst made more intense by its forbidden nature – like a romance between the offspring of feuding families.’’
MPI held similar concerns.
‘‘We did get a phone call from MPI when we started doing this – they were accusing us of mixing wine and beer – saying you can’t do that, it’s illegal. And we said, ‘no … we’re not mixing wine and beer at all – think of it as a fruit beer, which is totally legitimate. Grapes are a fruit’.’’
Mixing beer and wine – as in taking two separately fermented beverages and blending them – is illegal. And weird. But as weird as Garage Project can be, they are creatives and all their beerwine hybrids are what’s known as co-ferments. The grapes are added to the raw beer (known as wort) and the whole thing is fermented as one product.
Of course, not everyone is aware of the rules – Soren Eriksen from 8 Wired in Warkworth admits his beer-wine hybrid, Once Upon A Time In Blenheim, probably broke the rules as he fermented his own wine, then blended it with a beer that had been aged in barrels for three years before putting the finished product in another barrel to continue ageing.
‘‘Neither the beer nor the wine on its own tasted very good but when we blended them and aged them it became greater than the sum of its parts.’’
Creating beer-wine hybrids is nothing new in the history of beer – it was common practice thousands of years ago and one of Belgium’s most famous breweries, Cantillon, has made a grapegrain beer for 50 years.
But in an industry where everyone is looking for the next new thing, there’s been a resurgence in beer-wine hybrids. The modern trend can be traced to American experimental brewery Dogfish Head. Its owners worked with molecular archeologist Patrick McGovern to create Midas Touch, a recipe based on evidence McGovern found in a Turkish tomb believed to have belonged to King Midas. The beer was brewed with honey, white Muscat grapes, and saffron.
It took a while for this ancient beer foray to become more mainstream – as much as obscure craft beer recipes can be called mainstream.
Garage Project made its first hybrid in 2013 with Sauvin Nouveau, a pilsner made with 10 per cent sauvignon blanc grapes. It followed with Chateau Aro, an ale fermented with pinot noir grapes, including the skins.
Gillespie admits the first vintage was a bit rough but they nailed the 2017 vintage. ‘‘You don’t want to leave the skins in there too long because you get really unpleasant tannic character. Logistically it was a nightmare. The first year we weren’t super impressed but the second year we cracked it by ageing it as you would a pinot, in barrels, because the tannins mellow and the flavours come together.
‘‘The wine-maker at Escarpment, where we got the grapes, wasn’t that impressed the first year he was like ‘bloody brewers…’. The second year he phoned and all I heard was ‘‘F…, f…, f… it’s f…ing good.’ When you please a wine-maker you know you’ve cracked it.’’
Around the same time Garage Project started its ‘‘illicit trysts’’, Yeastie Boys teamed with Adelaide winery Some Young Punks to produce three beerwine hybrids as part of its Spoonbender series. Rather than add grape juice, it used the wine to create what’s known as invert, or candi, sugar. It took a dessert wine and reduced it before adding it to beer.
‘‘It took over a year for me to navigate Customs and Excise to get the wine imported into New Zealand duty free because we were going to boil off the alcohol in production,’’ says Yeastie Boys founder Stu McKinlay.
‘‘And then it was close to another year before we had developed the recipes and managed to have them brewed commercially.’’
In 2017 it teamed with Gladstone Vineyard to create a similar amalgam. Gladstone made a viognier-sauvignon blanc blend which Yeastie Boys used to make candi sugar. Gladstone released the original wine under the name Pushmi, and the beer was called Pullyu. ‘‘Drinkers could try the beer and the wine to see how the flavours were intertwined,’’ McKinlay says. Pushmi-Pullyu is, of course, a fictional two-headed animal from The Story of Doctor Dolittle.
Yeastie Boys’ latest concoction – out now – is called White Palace. It is – brace yourself – a Brut India Pale Lager with pinot gris and passionfruit. The more user-friendly (but still long) description is a strong ultra-dry lager brewed with pinot gris and passionfruit.
Yeastie Boys’ UK-based brewer James Kemp said the recipe was his way of trying to recreate the character of passionfruit Bellini in a beer.
He used a naturally occurring enzyme to break down the complex sugars to create the Champagnelike dryness and used hops with a pinot gris profile, while the passionfruit brings ‘‘a certain amount of acidity to build on the Champagne character that I’m trying to create. Fermenting this beer was the main challenge with a lot of different elements to consider.’’
It sounds like a lot of trouble but McKinlay says the raft of ingredients serve a purpose and the beverages are certainly food-friendly in all the ways wine can be.
‘‘I’ve always considered us more like chefs than winemakers, or traditional brewers, as we have a near infinite amount of things that we can use as ingredients in beer. In saying that, we do believe in the less-is-more philosophy and will never chuck things at a beer unless there’s a very specific reason for it to be there.’’
McKinlay says White Palace has the extreme dryness of Brut Champagne, and ‘‘comes across more wine-like (or cider-like), than any of the other beer-wine hybrids that I’ve tried’’.
Garage Project’s latest beer-wine hybrid teeters on the edge of being classified a wine as it’s 51 per cent traditional beer and 49 per cent ‘‘wine’’ – although that does nothing to describe the complexity of Savoir Faire.
In this case the unfermented beer was poured into an amphora – a large pottery urn – and slightly