From Jester King:

We’re very excited to introduce, Jester King / Live Oak:
Kollaborationsbiermittschechischemhopfenundwilderbakterienhefekombination

…(or Kollaborationsbier for short) — our collaboration with Live Oak Brewing Co. in Austin, Texas! Live Oak is the oldest brewery in Austin, and the maker of some of the best German and Czech-style beers in the world. They are among the handful of breweries that inspired us to make beer in the first place, and we couldn’t be more pleased to have had the opportunity to work with them.
Kollaborationsbiermittschechischemhopfenundwilderbakterienhefekombination literally means “collaboration beer with Czech hops, wild yeast, and bacteria” in German. The inspiration for the beer came from two sources. First, we really wanted to make a beer with Live Oak, which again, is a brewery we love. Second, another hugely inspirational brewery for us, along with Live Oak, is Brasserie De La Senne in Brussels, Belgium. De La Senne makes one of our favorite beers called Taras Boulba, which embraces principles of subtlety, restraint, balance, and full attenuation. Its elegant combination of European malt character, hoppiness, dryness, and yeast aroma and flavor sets a benchmark for what beer can be. Coincidentally, one of the few American beers reminiscent of Taras Boulba in terms of its malt and hop character is Live Oak Pilz. We knew that to truly make a beer worthy of claiming inspiration from Taras Boulba, we’d need to turn to our friends at Live Oak for help!

In making Kollaborationsbier, we brewed a low gravity wort at Live Oak with Head Brewer Dusan Kwiatkowski. The wort was prepared using a traditional decoction mash, beginning with undermodified pilsner malt and then working it vigorously by separating out a portion of the mash, boiling it in the kettle, and then returning it to the mash tun. This creates some really tasty malt flavors in the wort that cannot be achieved through other methods. We then added a few hefty doses of Czech hops to the boil for a firm bitterness and floral, spicy hop aromas and flavors. After brewing and cooling the wort, we racked it into portable tanks and drove it from east Austin to the outskirts of town in the Texas Hill Country whereJester King Brewery is located, transferred it into one of our fermentation tanks, and inoculated it with our unique mixed culture of brewer’s yeast and naturally occurring wild yeast and bacteria. The beer fermented to complete dryness (0 degrees Plato or 1.000 specific gravity) and was naturally conditioned through refermentation in kegs, casks, and bottles. Kollaborationsbier is 4.2% alcohol by volume and 42 IBU. It was brewed using only City of Austin water, malted barley, and hops and fermented with brewer’s yeast, wild yeast, and bacteria.

Kollaborationsbier will be released at Jester King Brewery on Friday, October 24th when our tasting room opens at 4pm. We’re also excited to announce that onSaturday, October 25th at Noon, we’ll be joined by Live Oak owner Chip McElroy and Head Brewer Dusan Kwiatkowski. They’ll be bringing a cask of spund Helles Rauchlager with them for our tasting room! Kollaborationsbier will be available by the glass at Jester King Brewery. We’ll also have bottles available for sale (3,300 bottles available, 750ml, $12, limit 2 per customer per day). For the first weekend of bottle sales (October 24th through the 26th), only 1,000 bottles will be available. The art for Kollaborationsbier is by our own Josh Cockrell.

Craft beer is about trends.

Photo Courtesy of The Brewers Association and       Jason E Kaplan

If you stop and look close enough at the craft industry, you can see the trends come and go, new ones pop up and thrive, and others fade in popularity.  This is not something necessarily bad for the craft beer industry. New trends can expose new consumers to craft beer and keep them there for good, long after the trend that brought them there has lessened in adoration. If you go to enough festivals and tasting events, you can start to get a picture of these trends.

Four years ago, I noticed chocolate coming on strong. And then two or three years ago, I noticed a lot more bourbon and whiskey barrel aged beers than I once saw. After the 2014 Great American Beer Festival, I can safely say that the current dominant trend is everything funky. Sours, tarts, wilds, and every style in between.

As someone with a palate more suited to the bitter and sour, this period of the funk is right up my alley. Cake and chocolate have always overwhelmed my palate, but something bitter or sour? I’m at home. However, what’s a bit surprising to me is just how large this trend has become. Compared to previous trends I’ve seen in the last couple years of going to GABF, this is larger than them all.

Although I did notice much more wilds and sours while making my list of breweries and beers on my “cannot miss” list before my trip to Denver, it didn’t quite hit me how popular sours were until I stood in my first line. I noticed several larger lines in the surrounding area of California breweries, for instance. When I asked someone next to me what the line was about he replied “They’ve got sours. If they have sours, they’re going to have a line.” The word sour alone is enough to draw the crowds.

The dedication to funky beers has even created another festival during GABF week in Denver called ‘What the Funk?,’ now in its second year. This festival on a much smaller scale is exactly what you think it is: sours, tarts, barrel ageds, and funky beers for as far as the eye can see. Interestingly enough, this was the only festival in Denver that you could sample Jester King.  Though my schedule did not allow me to attend this festival, I am making sure that I’m there front and center in 2015.

I want to stop you if you feel that I’m comparing the growth of sours in the US craft industry to any sort of bubble. The crowds are there for the sours. The crowds are growing for the sours. The areas of the country with the best wild yeast available are seeing huge growth and their beers are becoming more and more sought after at festivals and through private beer trading.  Jester King’s bottle releases are becoming more and more of “must” events for Texan beer drinkers. Breweries like The Bruery are separating their wild yeast operations from the rest of the brewery, both out of internal infrastructure necessity and out of sheer supply/demand from today’s craft drinkers.

I didn’t even realize my own love of funk until I landed in Dallas and looked over my rankings of beers I tasted at this year’s GABF. Out of the top 5 beers on my list, there were 2 sours and 2 wild ales.  My only hope for the near future is for Dallas area breweries to take a stab at one or two. The market is there. I promise.

Lee Knox is the Travel Contributor for Beer Drinkers Society

Founders Brewing is rolling out their Black Rye, “a dry-hopped dark ale brewed with copious amounts of rye malt.” Black Rye is a retired recipe of Founders’ from 2006 “it was available for less than a year, but it developed a cult following. And the brewery decided to reach into their recipe vault and bring it back for 2015.”

“Because of how quickly the craft beer enthusiast community has grown, most people drinking craft beer and even Founders beer today have never tried Black Rye,” said Dave Engbers, co-founder and vice president of brand and education at Founders Brewing Co. “Officially, this beer is a re-introduction. But for most, it’s a new Founders beer.”

Founders says “Black Rye is a perfectly balanced blend of German- and American-grown hops, premium 2-row barley and heavily kilned rye and wheat malts.” Black Rye is a craft beer that doesn’t fit in any category. The unique combination of ingredients and flavors will have you debating in which category it belongs.

“Black Rye is one of those beers that we kept coming back to in our conversations about new releases,” said Jeremy Kosmicki, Founders’ brewmaster. “There are so many craft beers out there, but this one has its place because there’s nothing else quite like it.”

“Black Rye will kick off the Founders’ seasonal calendar in 2015, with availability from roughly January to March, dependent on distributor shipments. It will be released in the brewery’s taproom on draft and in bottles as of January 2015. Founders’ other seasonal releases in 2015 will be Rubaeus, from April to September, and Breakfast Stout, from October to December. The brewery’s full 2015 availability calendar will be announced later this year.”

From Jester King:
We’re excited to announce that when our tasting room opens this Friday, October 10th at 4pm, we’ll be releasing our second blend of Omniscience & Proselytism — our barrel-aged, wild beer refermented with strawberries. For our second blend of Omniscience & Proselytism, we sent mature, sour beer aged for months in oak barrels into a foudre filled with several hundred pounds of strawberries. We then allowed the wild yeast and bacteria in the beer to referment the sugars in the fruit to complete dryness. The result is a tart, dry beer with interesting flavors and aromas from the fruit, as well as the yeast and bacteria. We don’t add fruit to flavor filtered and/or pasteurized beer to make a “beer cooler”. Rather, we ferment the fruit in the same way wine grapes are fermented to make wine, so that the finished beer is something greater than the sum of the parts.

Unlike our first blend of Omniscience & Proselytism, which used local strawberries, this blend used strawberries from Oregon. We prefer to use local ingredients whenever possible. However, the quality of our beer comes first. Regardless of the source of strawberries, we continue to only use fresh or fresh/frozen fruit. We do not use fruit concentrates, extracts or flavorings in our beer.

Omniscience & Proselytism was brewed with Hill Country well water, barley, wheat, and hops. It was fermented with our house blend of microorganisms consisting of brewers’ yeast and naturally occurring wild yeast and bacteria we cultured from the land that surrounds our brewery in the Texas Hill Country. It is 5.3% alcohol by volume, 3.2 pH, and has a finishing gravity of 1.002 (0.5 degrees Plato). It is unfiltered, unpasteurized, and 100% naturally conditioned.

Our first blend of Omniscience & Proselytism, released in October of 2013, was only available by the glass at our brewery. Our second blend will be available to go in 500ml bottles, as well as by the glass. Aside from a few special events, Omniscience & Proselytism will be exclusively available at Jester King Brewery. Roughly 3,000 bottles are available, and the bottle limit (500ml, $16) is one per customer per day.

From Jester King:
We’re excited to announce that when our tasting room opens this Friday, September 26th at 4pm, we’ll be releasing our second blend of Aurelian Lure — our barrel-aged, wild beer refermented with apricots.

Aurelian Lure is actually one of the trickier beers we make. It amounts to a great balancing act in order to get the flavors we want in the finished beer. This can be especially difficult when working with wild yeasts and bacteria, which are often unpredictable. However, through experience, we’ve developed some techniques that we feel have resulted in the right balance, particularly in the realm of organic acids. For instance, for this year’s blend, we reduced the amount of contact time the apricots had with the beer to slightly reduce the amount of citric acid. We also blended a base beer from our stock of mature beer in oak barrels that was relatively low in lactic acid. We did this because we knew we would still be getting a good amount of citric acid from the fruit, despite the shorter contact time. The citric acid creates a firm sourness in the beer. Finally, as we do for all our beer, we carefully controlled the temperature of the refermentation to keep the development of acetic acid (think vinegar) at an absolute minimum. Overall, we’re content here at Jester King to take a hands-off approach and be patient while time and natural fermentation with native microorganisms do their thing. But when it comes to temperature, we’re adamant about controlling this variable because we by no means want our beer to be acetic or vinegary. In order to stave off acetic acid, we also performed “punch downs” on the cap (the layer of fruit that rises to the surface during refermentation) to prevent oxidation that could lead to its development. Punch downs also lead to better color and flavor extraction from the fruit. All of these techniques resulted in a beer that we feel is very well balanced and drinkable, especially in terms of the organic acids.

Our second blend of Aurelian Lure is made from Hill Country well water, malted barley, malted wheat, hops, brewers yeast, naturally occurring wild yeast and native bacteria, and apricots. It’s 6.0% alcohol by volume, has a finishing gravity of 1.001 (0.25 Plato), and is 3.4 pH. Like all our beer, it is unfiltered, unpasteurized, and 100% naturally conditioned by refermentation in the serving vessel, as opposed to being artificially force-carbonated.

As we mentioned, Aurelian Lure will go on sale this Friday, September 26th at 4pm at Jester King Brewery. Our first blend of Aurelian Lure was released last October during Austin Beer Week at our Funk n’ Sour Fest. Only about 400 bottles were available, which were tied to admission to the fest. While blend 2 is still a small release, the bottle count is much higher this year. We have approximately 2,700 bottles (500ml, $16) for sale. We also have about six kegs of Aurelian Lure blend 2 we’ll be pouring in our tasting room starting Friday, as well as a few gravity kegs. Aside from some upcoming special events, Aurelian Lure blend 2 will not be sold beyond Jester King Brewery.