Abolitionist Ale Works begins year two

Brewer Mike Vance and Abolitionist Ale Works completed their first year of beer sales together in June. Now, year two promises to deliver even more of Vance’s mouth-watering, fruity saisons and funky West Virginia wild ales.

Brilliant Stream asked Mike to look back over the past year and talk about what he and the Charles Town based brewery have learned.

“What I’ve probably learned the most is to stay hard at it,” he says. “I want to always play with fun beers and fun flavors and always have something new. I think I’m going to stay hard-headed. I just want to make what I like to make and focus on those good flavors.”

Unlike most popular breweries of today, Vance usually keeps only one traditional IPA on tap at a time. You might think that limiting sales of America’s most popular craft beer style would deter business, but it has not. He has seen a growing acceptance of his farmhouse beer philosophy.

Saison: Abolitionist’s IPA beater

“At first it seemed like all anybody wanted was just IPA,” he said. “But I stayed hard-headed and only single-batched IPA and always would do other beer so I could keep other flavors on tap.

“Now going into the second year, I can’t even keep the one-off saisons on, like the strawberry lavender and strawberry basil. The saisons are starting to sell so well, they’re actually selling more than the IPA. At the beginning it was different. It’s like night and day. In the beginning, saison was like the 6th best seller. It’s definitely up to number one now.”

One thing he quickly noticed: A lot of people didn’t know about saison and were hesitant to try it. But once they tried it, they realized it was a easy drinking beer with very attractive flavors.

From the beginning, I wanted to constantly change. I didn’t want a flagship. For me, ‘signature beer’ and’ flagship,’ those are just words against creativity. — Mike Vance of Abolitionist Ale Works

He moved customers from exclusively IPAs by always having his saisons and wild ales on tap and encouraging sampling. He wouldn’t say he necessarily pushed it, but for the first four or five months, he went around and talked to customers and asked them what they really liked.

What he learned was, it’s not that people exclusively loved IPA, it’s just that IPA was all people knew to order. It’s the hot beer style of the day. The average customer didn’t know much about other beer styles, but when he talked to them, he found them open to learning.

His secret to making great saison

“It’s definitely the yeast,” Mike asserted when asked his secret to making great saison. He is close to the 20th generation of the saison yeast strain he uses, which he originally purchased from a commercial yeast lab. “I have to work with the yeast and let it do its thing; let it dry the beer out.”

His saison malt bill is a classic one. He uses about 70% pilsner malt, 20% light Munich malt and 10% wheat. In the kettle, he hops it with Saaz and Mosaic.

Vance believes you can’t rush quality. His house saison sits in the fermentor for at least four weeks. He then kegs it into half-barrels, adds a little pear juice to provide the priming sugar needed to carbonate it, and adds Hallertau Blanc hops for dry hopping.

When that process is complete, you have Shenandoah Saison, his house saison. “All these beers are very simple,” he says. “It’s a good canvas to build flavors on.”

And build flavors, he does, most often with fruits and herbs. He rattles off strawberry-lavender, strawberry-basil, strawberry-peppercorn, rosemary-vanilla, cherry, plum, peach and more. You will also find him adding brettanomyces to a saison and letting it work for several months in a wine barrel. The results are spectacular. Sometimes he just puts the fresh saison into a used French oak wine barrel and lets it go for a few months to pick up the vanilla and other flavors from the wood. Because everything is small batch, you pretty much find something different on tap with each visit.

Local fruits, herbs add culinary touch

He gets most of his fruit from Orr’s Farm near Martinsburg. He says it is definitely some of the best fruit in West Virginia. Recent produce purchases include: black raspberries currently aging with saison in a wine barrel to make Purple Is The New Noir, and Rich May peaches currently working in a batch of Best Virginia with some wild local yeast and local West Virginia hops from Bullskin Hops (3 miles away) and aging in a local wine barrel.

Local blueberries and Golden Delicious apples end up in one of his more popular brews: Blue and Gold ‘N’ Delicious, which is summer saison brewed with wheat and oats and fermented with blueberries and apples. Such a big seller, “It’s hard to keep on tap,” Mike says.

Sours beginning to catch on

Mike feels that here on the East Coast, sour beer drinkers are more in the minority. But among the more beer-educated customers, he sees a growing demand. He does not do kettle-sours or quick sours. All his non-barrel-aged sours spend a minimum of three months in stainless to develop their flavors  Barrel-aged sours spend that time and more in wood barrels.

Because Abolitionist has only been open for a year, he has not yet released a lot of barrel-aged sours. Some of the sours that he thought were his best efforts to date are:

• Pale the Funky aged with raspberries and blueberries;
• After Midnight, a bourbon barrel aged dark sour conditioned with table grapes;
• The Funky Beet sour wheat ale, keg conditioned with beet juice;
• Harpers Berry. a non-barrel aged sour with blueberries; and,
• West Funkin Virginia, probably his best-selling sour ale, barrel fermented with WV wild yeast and aged with Brettanomyces, then dry hopped with Mosaic.

While sours can be pretty slow sellers during the week, Abolitionist sees a lot of by-the-glass, bottle, and growler sales of sours over the weekends. Mike says this means that sours are more popular with the visitors coming into town than with locals. Most of those visitors are coming from the nearby, more urban areas of northern Virginia and Maryland.

Everything sold at the brewery

Outside of Charles Town, Abolitionist beers are extremely rare and will likely remain that way for the foreseeable future. The brewery sells about 99 percent of the beer it makes through its taproom. First year business was very good and definitely met expectations says brewery owner Josh Vance (Mike’s brother).

Mike says he is not concerned with getting his beer into distribution. He wants Abolitionist Ale Works to be a beer destination. He doesn’t have enough beer left to sell to other accounts even if he wanted to. With that said, he will continue to pour his beer at a couple of WV beer festivals and continue to support a few special beer events at places like The Apothecary in Morgantown and Summit Beer Station in Huntington.

No huge investment needed to make good beer

Vance’s brewery is a testament to frugality. The high quality of his beer demonstrates that you don’t have to spend a fortune on brewing equipment  to make superior beer.

“I wanted to be in business to make beer and not loan payments,” said Mike   explaining why he didn’t spend a whole lot of money on his brewing equipment.

He estimated he only spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $20,000 for his primary brewing set-up of brew kettle, mash tun and fermenters. Abolitionist Ale Works’ equipment model could be a good example for other prospective neighborhood breweries to follow.

Abolitionist Ale Works website

Use this link to see  the good flavors currently on tap at Abolitionist Ale Works.