Pawpaw beer boosts Ohio festival

The world showcase for pawpaw beer happens right here in Appalachia. Last weekend, the 20th Annual Ohio Pawpaw Festival featured nine pawpaw flavored brews from eight Ohio breweries. It’s certainly come a long way since Kelly Sauber, then Marietta Brewing Company’s head brewer, made the first pawpaw beer for the festival 16 years ago.

Albany, Ohio resident and pawpaw farmer Chris Chmiel founded the festival back in 1999. A few years into it, he thought adding a pawpaw beer might boost the festival’s popularity, as well as promote another use for the pawpaw fruit. He called on his friend Sauber for help.

As Sauber remembers it, Chmiel came to him one day in 2002 while he was working at Marietta Brewing and said, “Kelly, I’d like it if you could make a pawpaw beer for the Pawpaw Festival.” Initially, Sauber was unsure, but Chmiel ended up talking him into it.

Chmiel recollects that Sauber tried making a pawpaw wheat beer, “and he liked it, and we liked it.” That was the beginning of a true phenomena.

So in 2002, the festival obtained its first beer sales permit and set up a beer stand. Sauber took on the responsibility of coordinating beer sales. That first year he made only one keg of Pawpaw Wheat beer, just to see if it sold. “It sold really fast and we ran out,” he said. “The next year I made more.”

For his second year at the festival, pawpaws happened to be in short supply, so Sauber augmented the pawpaw beer with other beers featuring local ingredients. Those included a spruce tip Scottish ale, a sassafras pale ale, and a spicebush berry stout. The third year, with pawpaws in good supply, he was able to make 10 kegs of Pawpaw Wheat. Things just took off from there.

It soon got to the point where Sauber could no longer make enough beer on Marietta’s 7-barrel system to supply both the festival and his taproom, so he recruited other brewing friends to make additional pawpaw beer. The first was Brad Clark. In 2006, Clark was the new brewer at O’Hooleys in Athens, when he jumped in to brew some Paw Paw Wheat. Clark continued brewing that beer as the brewery transitioned to become Jackie O’s Brewery (where it is still brewed today). But the festival needed even more beer.

In 2011, Sauber recruited Jay and Lori Wince at Weasel Boy Brewing in Zanesville, Ohio to add an additional batch of pawpaw beer, but the festival still sold out of beer. In other years he added pawpaw beers from Buckeye Brewing in Lakewood, Black Box Brewing in Westlake, Thirsty Dog Brewing in Akron, and others.

“At one point we had 10 breweries making pawpaw beer for the festival,” Sauber said, noting that the festival would go through 80 kegs of pawpaw beer in the weekend.

In 2016, after many years of heading the festival beer garden, Sauber decided to turn that job over to others. And today, the beer tent is still the festival’s most popular attraction.

Looking back, Chmiel sees that adding pawpaw beer contributed much to the overall festival’s success. 

“I would say that the beers have been pretty critical in making the festival more festive. As soon as we started serving beer, it really changed the whole dynamic, and it’s sort of become a little microbrew festival its own sense. If you go over to the beer area, you’ll see how crowded it is over there.”

MANY VARIETIES OF PAWPAW BEER

Through the years, numerous brewers have experimented with pawpaw beer, and it’s now made in many different styles, from sours, to Weisse beer, to porter, to Saison and IPA. “Everyone is playing with different styles just to see how they can use the fruit,” Sauber said.

This year the festival beer line up included:

• Saison Paw Paw, Thirsty Dog Brewing, Akron
• Weasel Paw Pawpaw Pale Ale, Weasel Boy Brewing, Zanesville
• Paw Paw Wa Wa Blonde, North High Brewing, Columbus
• Pawpaw Murkshake IPA, Sixth Sense Brewing, Jackson
• Pawpaw Hef, Sixth Sense Brewing, Jackson
• Pawpaw Weizen, Little Fish Brewing, Athens
• PawPale Ale, Devil’s Kettle Brewing, Athens
• Pawpaw Cream Ale, Maple Lawn Brewery, Pomeroy
• Pawpaw Wheat, Jackie O’s Brewery, Athens

WHAT MAKES PAWPAW SO GOOD IN BEER

Sauber thinks pawpaw has a great flavor profile for a wheat beer. He says pawpaw has a taste somewhere between banana, mango, and strawberry — very tropical flavored — and the characteristics of a wheat beer lets the fruit show through.

Brad Clark is also in the wheat beer camp. He thinks the pawpaw fruit stands well on its own, so he doesn’t mix pawpaw with any other adjuncts or flavorings. “It’s such a unique fruit, and it’s got such a unique story,” said Clark. “It’s something that not a lot of people know much about or have ever even heard of. My take on it has always been to show them what pawpaw is, to show them what pawpaw beer can be.”

Clark says Jackie O’s stays pretty true to the original Kelly Sauber recipe. “We haven’t messed with it much. It’s been a really fun beer.”

Jackie O’s Paw Paw Wheat has become a highly anticipated annual seasonal release for the brewery, currently packaged in bottles as well as draft. This is the first year Paw Paw Wheat bottles get the benefit of Jackie O’s new pasteurizer. Pasteurizing will help ensure a more shelf stable product. 

Weasel Boy’s Jay Wince enjoys making pawpaw beer and has contributed one to the festival each of the last eight years. He says he tries to craft a brew that lets the fruit shine through. His popular Pawpaw Pale Ale with added local honey has become a summer favorite at the brewery since it’s introduction in 2011. The pawpaw adds to the fruitiness of his English-style pale ale.

For Little Fish’s Sean White, while he finds brewing with pawpaw can be challenging, in another sense, it’s right up his alley. “We love to brew with local ingredients, indigenous ingredients, foraged foods. All that stuff really interests me.” He found that the pawpaw showed very well in the German-style hefeweizen he made for the festival.

As the new kid on the block, one might expect Sixth Sense Brewing to brew something a bit different. They did not disappoint. Their Pawpaw Murkshake is a full-on milkshake IPA in style. Brewer Mike Davis put a ton of pawpaw, lactose, and juicy hops in the pot to produce this super fruit forward beer. Pawpaw Murkshake was the buzz of the festival.

North High Brewing’s Jason McKibben put his degree in food science to work formulating their Paw Paw Wa Wa Blonde Ale. He infused a pawpaw ale with two liters-per-keg of fresh watermelon juice to produce the perfect quaffer for a hot summer day. 

Maple Lawn Brewery’s Pawpaw Cream Ale showed that a cream ale does not have to be bland and forgettable. The mango-banana flavors rode the cream ale backbone as ever so smoothly and worked its magic on the palate. Brewer Hank Cleland has a heck of a beer here.

Last week at the Ohio Pawpaw Festival’s first-ever homebrew competition, a Pawpaw Gose took first place. This is another example of pawpaw complementing one of today’s more popular beer styles. Devil’s Kettle Brewing will brew a commercial batch of this beer later in the year.

FESTIVAL SPAWNS PAWPAW BEER INDUSTRY

With the Ohio Pawpaw Festival, Chris Chmiel created quite the nice stage for pawpaw beer, and pawpaw beer has given the festival its signature product. While pawpaw also appears at the festival as foods, plants, and art, none of these has given so much back to the event as has the pawpaw beer. The growing popularity of pawpaw as a beer ingredient has also helped Integration Acres, Chmiel’s pawpaw production business. Integration Acres is the world’s largest supplier of pawpaws. 

“Us having the festival and having beer at the festival has created a demand above and beyond the festival,” says Chmiel. “We’ve got breweries contacting us from all over the U.S. and Canada.” Recently, a Georgia meadery bought a whole truckload of pulp. He has shipped pawpaw pulp to brewers in Indiana, New Jersey, New York, Chicago, Ohio, and other places.

Integration Acres grows pawpaws and  purchases foraged pawpaws, then processes them for use in beverage and food products. The growth in pawpaw beer is directly linked to Integration Acres’ ability to process and store the frozen pawpaw pulp. Most Ohio brewers buy their pawpaw pulp from them. Using frozen pulp, brewers can make a pawpaw beer any time of year.

To prepare pawpaws for use in food and beverage production, the skin and seeds must be removed from the fully ripened fruit. Processing mushy ripe pawpaw fruit is a messy job. It’s a process brewers aren’t set up to handle, especially when needing a larger quantity of fruit.

Chmiel’s interest in pawpaws goes way back. After college, he took his passion for sustainable, organic food production and started a farm in rural Athens County, Ohio. At the farm he developed an interest in the native pawpaws that grew there. Soon, he began cultivating them and also buying them from foragers. He founded his business, Integration Acres, Ltd., around this endeavor. In 1999, along with other local business and community leaders, Chmiel spearhead the establishment of the Ohio Pawpaw Festival.

When asked how this year’s pawpaw harvest was going, Chmiel replied, “It’s good. It’s going on now. We’re about half way through it. It’s a good year.”

As for the originator of pawpaw beer, Kelly Sauber left commercial brewing in 2010 to found Fifth Element Spirits, a craft distillery in Meigs County, Ohio, and soon to be opening in Athens. He and his partner also opened the West End CiderHouse in Athens, which got Kelly into cider making. At both his distillery and cidery, he sources most of his ingredients from within 50 miles of Athens.

NAPGA SUPPORT BREWING WITH PAWPAWS

Dayton resident Greg Hoertt, a vice-president of the North American Pawpaw Growers Association and also a homebrewer, says he absolutely sees a growing interest in pawpaws among brewers. He says pawpaws are one of the few options a brewer has when seeking a local, indigenous fruit that actually tastes good in beer. He’s worked with 50 West Brewing Company in Cincinnati and Devil Wind Brewing in Xenia developing pawpaw beers.

“First of all, the flavor is unique,” he says. “It adds aroma and flavor to the beer. The fruity flavor is very complimentary to many styles of beer. To me, it makes delicious beer.”

In the past, brewers didn’t think the delicate pawpaw flavor blended well with real hoppy beer, but with the advent of the new juicy, hazy IPA styles, that thinking is evolving. Hoertt thinks the New England IPA style is a perfect platform because it doesn’t have the bitterness of a traditional American IPA. It lets the pawpaw’s delicate fruitiness shine through and complements it with the right selection of tropical juicy hops.

Beyond Ohio, well-reviewed pawpaw beers are showing up at places like Fonta Flora Brewery in North Carolina and Upland Brewing in Indiana. Upland calls its PawPaw Sour one of its most sought-after beers. They brew it as a golden sour ale, created by aging their “base sour blonde ale, Basis, on fresh pawpaw fruit from Indiana.” Fonta Flora’s Carolina Custard is a wild Appalachian barley/wheat ale aged 4-6 months in oak, then with pawpaw fruit added it is refermented and aged for an additional 6 months in neutral wine barrels.

GETTING THE PAWPAW INTO THE BEER

The Brewers Roundtable at the Ohio Pawpaw Festival provided a good behind-the-glass look at the art of brewing with pawpaws. Five Ohio brewers talked about their processes and what they’ve learned.

Most use the frozen pawpaw pulp from Integration Acres because the pawpaw fruit is so time consuming to process at the brewery. They add the pawpaw pulp to the beer at some point during the fermentation process. Some add it following primary fermentation; some add it during primary fermentation.

Brad Clark of Jackie O’s adds pawpaw pulp on the second day of fermentation. About one-half pound per gallon. No skins or seeds. He adds only straight pawpaw to the beer, no other adjuncts. Dries it out in fermentation. Lets the 9% alcohol give it the impression of sweetness.

Sean White of Little Fish found pawpaws made a good hefeweizen. He used one-half pound of pawpaw per gallon and a Bavarian yeast strain, which throws off a little clove aroma. It dried out a bit more than traditional hefe. Finished at 5.5% ABV. Preserved the pawpaw taste in a subtle way.

Jay Wince of Weasel Boy makes a basic English-Style pale ale that allows the added fruit and honey to come through. Uses 20 pounds of pawpaw per barrel (0.65 lbs per gallon).

Mike Davis of Sixth Sense likes sessionable beer even when brewing a 9.6% ABV murkshake. He puts a tiny amount of hops in the boil; but adds tons of juicy dry hopping. It’s the same hopping as a double NEIPA and it puts a huge amount of fruit in the aroma and taste that complements the pawpaw. Adds lactose late in boil. Lactose helps it finish sweet and smooth. Adds pawpaw near the end of primary fermentation. The result is a well balanced beer that goes down so easy.

Links for more information

Ohio Pawpaw Festival website  
Integration Acres

More festival photos