What Makes Our Beer Special: Inoculation

We can’t be the only ones to be excited to talk about inoculation! Funny enough it’s a key part of our unique process in making beer so it is something we talk about a lot. We’d like to tell you about the two ways we create our beer – read on for the details!

All beer requires the introduction of a “fermenting agent” to actually makes the beer from the wort created during the mashing process. For regular beers this agent is typically a single type of brewers yeast (from the genus Saccromyces) grown specifically for the target beer. These are usually identical clones of either historically significant yeasts or custom brewery yeasts. Funny enough you can order these online and receive a bucket of yeast a few days later to make your beer. What a world we live in!

Our process is a little different. We use two main methods to inoculate our beers: spontaneous fermentation that uses the air of the region where the beer is being brewed in an open vessel called a coolship and the microbes literally drop into the cooling beer to inoculate it or mixed fermentation where we add (called pitching) a mixture of microorganisms to the finished wort manually to inoculate the wort.

We’ve got longer posts on both Spontaneous Fermentation and Mixed Fermentation if you want to get super-nerdy on the topic.

The main difference between traditional brewing where a single yeast is used to make a beer, and spontaneous or mixed fermentation inoculation is consistency. With a single yeast you’re looking to control the process and make the exact beer each time, if possible. With spontaneous and mixed fermentation, especially in barrels, you’re guaranteeing inconsistent results that you can resolve in the blending process. That said, there are things you can do to be as consistent as possible with spontaneous and mixed fermentation brewing and that’s been the main thrust of our scientific research that we’ll talk about another day. We’ve developed processes to be surprisingly reliable and consistent with spontaneous brewing, though we also welcome to inevitable variability inherent to the method. We like the occasional surprise and think it makes our beer surprisingly good!