Local ingredients rule, ales gone wild

Trendy imperial pastry stouts and New England IPAs were as rare as hen’s teeth at Fonta Flora’s State of Origin beer festival last weekend in Morganton, North Carolina. Shoot, there were hardly any IPAs or adjunct stouts of any stripe there. Festival sacrilege? No, just a festival dedicated primarily to rarer, yet equally tasty, beer styles. 

About 900 adventurous beer fans came out to try less well-known beer varieties and experience a whole different side of America’s favorite fermented beverage. What they got were culinary, often experimental beverages that expanded the intersection of beer and local ingredients. Each beer a brewery brought to the festival had to include local ingredients from wherever it was brewed, hence then title, State of Origin.

What you found in abundance at State of Origin were ales that get their rich flavors from creative fermentation and the addition of local fruits, grains, and botanicals, instead of from the hops of IPAs or the added sugar, vanilla and cinnamon of pastry stouts. It appears that brewers who favor the use of local ingredients also have a proclivity for stepping beyond clean-beer brewing.

Wild, mixed-fermentation, brettanomyces, lactobacillus, farmhouse, rustic, saison, and barrel-fermented specialties ruled the day at State of Origin 2018. Mixtures of brewer’s yeast with native wild yeasts and native bacteria were common. When oak was used, it mostly took the form of neutral oaken barrels and foeders for wild fermentation and aging, rather than fresh whiskey barrels used to impart oaky and whiskey flavors.

Many of the beers used local malts, especially those of North Carolina maltsters Riverbend and Epiphany. That’s not to say you wouldn’t find adjunct ingredients. At State of Origin, the malt fermentables were often augmented with local fruits or grains. Among those fruits were blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, apples, peaches, paw paw, nectarines, strawberries, limes, oranges, spice bush berries, passion fruit, figs, chokeberries, and prickly pears. Local grains included sorghum, triticale, buckwheat, rye, oats, wheat, and heirloom corn varieties, such as Bloody Butcher, Jimmy Red, and Reid’s Yellow Dent. There was also local honey and molasses in some.

Extra flavors at State of Origin were obtained from the addition of locally-sourced, mostly foraged, botanicals. Among them were juniper, pine, cedar, black walnuts, sassafras root, goldenrod, dead nettle flowers, roselle, coriander, and others. And hops weren’t really left out of the party, either. In fact, there were a few hoppy farmhouse ales that would likely satisfy the inner hophead.

Great beer from far and near

It was super having wild and sour beers at the festival from big-name breweries such as Jester King, J. Wakefield, Plan Bee, Casey, Oxbow, and Black Project. But what was so incredibly heartening was tasting those famous beers side-by-side with ones from small North Carolina and Appalachian region breweries and finding our local guys making beer every bit as good.

There were so many standouts from the likes of Fonta Flora, Birds Fly South, Haw River, Fullsteam, Zebulon, Burial, Little Fish, Wooden Robot, and Carolina Bauernhaus, to name just a few. Small breweries that take their farmhouse, wild and sour beer styles seriously have democratized the styles so well that most of us now have great brewers of these styles close by. What a wonderful time to be a beer fan.

A great display of local ingredients

Not many other American beer festivals so well celebrate the wilder, local side of brewing than does State of Origin. It certainly is one of the jewels of the Appalachian beer scene. Local ingredients rule.

State of Origin has been held annually in June since 2014. It takes place on the grounds of the historic Burke County Courthouse in Morganton. Dates for the next festival should be announced in early 2019. The festival is organized by Fonta Flora Brewery.