Foraged Birch IPA at Weathered Ground

What does your brewing friend who is coming up from North Carolina bring with him? Why a carload of birch tree branches, of course. How else can you make a Foraged Birch IPA?

When multi-award winning brewer Todd Boera of Fonta Flora Brewery in North Carolina accepted an invitation to speak at the West Virginia Farm to Bottle Summit (April 8 in South Charleston), he contacted his buddy Sam Fonda at Weathered Ground Brewery to see if there was interest in him stopping by and brewing a collaboration beer following the conference. Of course, Sam said yes.

With the theme of the summit being the incorporation of farmed and foraged goods into local craft beverages, Fonda and Boera quickly got together on a brew recipe with that inspiration. Todd suggested flavoring a beer with Sweet Birch, a tree that was conveniently growing on his brewery’s Whippoorwill Farm in the hill country near Nebo, North Carolina. The inner bark of sweet birch has an intense wintergreen scent. It has long been used in Appalachia to make a natural wintergreen scented oil and to flavor birch beer sodas, teas, and such. The perfect time to harvest birch it is in the spring as the sap rises but before it leaves out. So, Todd took his loppers and trimmed a bunch of small branches and twigs off a tree, loaded them into his vehicle, and headed to West Virginia.

The Farm to Bottle Summit went well, and when it ended, Todd went over to Weathered Ground to spend the night as a guest of the Fondas. Early the next morning, Sam and Todd began their brew day. They decided on a pretty straightforward IPA recipe with a moderate ABV. “With the warm weather coming in, I want to make something crushable and easy drinking,” Sam said.

What they put in it

As the base malt, they selected Riverbend’s Southern Select Pale Malt, which Sam described as “a really good base malt that we use for most of our IPAs.” Riverbend Malts are produced in Asheville, NC and are used by regional breweries wanting to incorporate a more local flavor to their beer.

To the pale malt they added a dash of Riverbend’s Munich Malt, to give the beer a little toastiness. “It also helps with the mouthfeel,” Sam explained. And they threw in big dose of flaked oats to give the beer an even more viscous mouthfeel and extra body. They sure did not want this IPA to be too thin.

For hops, they decided on a mix of El Dorado and Mosaic — which both exhibit pretty tropical fruit flavors and fruity aromas to go with bit of pine and resin. They would add a very moderate amount of hops because they wanted the beer to feature the birch, not the hops. “We’re trying to let the birch shine,” Sam explained.

So let’s talk about the sweet birch. “Smelling it, it just smells amazing,” Sam exclaimed. “Very spearmint like.”

Sam was so right on that observation. Everyone in the brewhouse sniffed and tasted the twigs and bark and was likewise amazed at the intense, deep aroma. It was reminiscent of a concentrated wintergreen-teaberry syrup, if there is such a thing. There was a minty, sweet dark cherry thing going on. Wonderful. Marvelous. Oh, what nature wrought.

Anatomy of a Birch IPA brew day

First, the birch had to be cut into smaller pieces that would fit easily into Weathered Ground’s brewing tank.

To start the seven-barrel batch, they began with a traditional mashing process where the grains steeped in over 200 gallons of hot purified water for about 60 minutes.

When mashing was complete, the liquid was pumped into the brew kettle, where it was boiled for an hour and a half. While the boil was progressing, the spent grains were cleaned out of the mash tun.

The mash tun was then filled with the birch branches, which had been cut into smaller chunks and pieces.

After kettle flame out, the wort was whirpooled by pumping under it pressure around the inside of the kettle to create a spinning vortex. A bucket full of hop pellets was to the spinning liquid. Adding hops to the whirlpool extracts a less bitterness from the than if the hops were added to the boil, but retains more fruity flavors and aromas.

Once the hop pellets were well-incorporated into the wort, the liquid was pumped back over to the mash tun, where the birch twigs and branches steeped in the hot wort for about 30 minutes.

Next, the wort was pumped through a plate chiller to cool it down before it went into the fermentation tank. A dry English style ale yeast was then pitched into the fermentor and, within a few hours, a vigorous fermentation was underway.

The fermentation finished a few days later, and the beer was then dry-hopped with more Mosaic and El Dorado and rested for another dozen days or so before carbonating and kegging.

Foraged Birch IPA on tap this weekend

So now the beer is ready to drink. Weathered Ground will have its Barn To Barn Foraged Birch IPA on tap at the brewery beginning this Friday. It will also debut at the West Virginia Craft Brew Festival in Lewisburg on Saturday. For IPA fans in the northern part of the state, the beer will appear at Morgantown Brewing’s Dankfest on May 4. Over the next couple of weeks, look for the beer as well at several top craft beer retailers that normally sell Weathered Ground products.

When Sam Fonda was asked how it turned out, he said it tastes just like it smelled when brewing. “Intense but not overpowering. I’d say it’s an enticing aroma of fresh wintergreen and spearmint, all rounded out by a creamy texture or mouthfeel and great hop flavor from the El Dorado and Mosaic hops. All in all, it is a very easy drinking beer at 6% ABV.”

You have to love the possibilities when two creative, accomplished brewers collaborate. It is going to be fun trying the finished beer.

Second Fonda-Boera collaboration at WGB

Foraged Birch IPA is actually the second collaboration between Fonda and Boera at Weathered Ground Brewery. The first was a beer they brewed last year, which has been resting in barrels for about a year now. This beer is expected to be put into bottles and released sometime later this spring. Brilliant Stream will have a full write up on it once its release date is set by the brewery.

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Weathered Ground Brewery website link

Weathered Ground Brewery named WV Brewery of the Year, 2018