The majestic Peach Folk Funk

If you’re a fan of tart, fruited, flavorful beer styles, you gotta get over to Bad Shepherd Beer Co. soon and try their new batch of Peach Folk Funk. Peach Folk Funk shines as a barrel-soured saison with peaches added.

Peach Folk Funk is one of the best examples of
a traditional barrel-soured and
fruited ale that we’ve ever tasted
from a West Virginia brewer.

BRILLIANT STREAM

What’s it taste like

Ross Williams, Bad Shepherd’s head brewer and maker of the beer, describes it this way: “Lightly carbonated with a funky aroma and a distinct Brett funk flavor to go along with a light grainy/grassy initial taste impression. The initial impression is followed by a fruity, lactic acid punch. The beer finishes with a long, easy fruit glide.”

I say the flavor pop and smoothness of Peach Folk Funk provides an incredible, tasty and most endearing treat. The only drawback I could find is that the beer comes out of the Bad Shepherd tap a bit too cold for its best enjoyment. Before you drink it, let it warm up in the glass a while. That will allow the fruitiness to rise and shine and balance the beer’s tartness.

No doubt it’s one of the best examples of traditional barrel-soured and fruited ale that I’ve ever tasted from a West Virginia brewer.

Predictable unpredictability

Brewer William’s years of experience with barrel-aged beers shines through in Peach Folk Funk. But even with experience, making this beer style is not without its challenges.

One predictable and often challenging thing about barrel-soured beer is its unpredictability. A finished batch of barrel-aged beer can be quite different in character from the previous batch soured in that same barrel—even when it contains the same base-beer input. The determinants of difference include things like time, temperature, and most importantly, the mix of wild critters that take hold in the beer.

The places where critters roam

When we say critters we are talking about strains of souring bacteria and character-building yeasts that dominate a fresh beer’s aging process once it is inside a barrel. In the case of Peach Folk Funk, we’re talking primarily about lactobacillus and brettanomyces. In the world of microscopic organisms these two families of critters each have numerous strains within them, and these different strains can greatly influence the flavors that they produce in a beer.

A small brewery without a laboratory (like Bad Shepherd) can’t know exactly which strains have made their way into the barrel and which among them will dominate the aging process. Only by tasting the barreled beer over time can a brewer finds out if they have had success.

Out of this veil of unpredictability may come a gold nugget. It’s a bit like spinning the wheel of fortune — sometimes you go bust but every once in a while you hit the jackpot. When a brewer tastes the flavors that make for a great drinking beer, they pump the beer out of the barrel and into bottles and kegs for customers to enjoy.

Since the brewer determines and controls many inputs for barrel souring, making barrel-aged sours is not nearly as chancy as the blind squirrel who occasionally finds a nut—but still—Mother Nature always gets her say. To end up with a superior beer, it surely helps if the brewer has lots of experience working with barrels and critters. It’s a skill that takes time, many attempts, and a few failures along the way in order to gain the feel for how to increase the odds of making a great beer.

Putting in time and peaches

It’s clear that Ross Williams is well along the way to mastering the secrets of natural souring, aging, and fruiting a beer to produce an exceptionally satisfying beverage. Producing barrel soured and fruited beer is a long process, where one must have plenty of patience in order to master the technique.

Williams embarked on his Peach Folk Funk brewing trek two years ago by first making a fresh batch of saison-style ale. He began with a standard process of mashing (steeping the grains in hot water), then boiling the run-off liquid (wort) in the brew kettle, and finally cooling the wort and moving it to a stainless steel fermentation tank. He then added his yeast— Belle Saison from the Lallemand yeast company.

After the yeast started doing its work converting the sugar in the wort into alcohol, he didn’t let it finish its work in the stainless steel tank, but transferred it into a barrel. In this case it was a former wine barrel which he had also used previously to sour a batch of beer. Along with the critters it came with from the winery, Williams dosed the barrel with dregs from several different beer bottles—beers known for their active bacteria and bretts. These critters took up residence in the barrel and produced a house culture that Williams determined was a good one from the results of the first beer batch he soured in it.

His barrel full of saison was then stored in the brewery’s front barrel room, which is kept heated and air-conditioned to maintain a fairly constant room temperature. After about a year in the barrel, he determined that the sourness was nicely developing and the beer was ready for its fruit addition. He then added 20 pounds of peach puree to the barrel and let it sit re-fermenting and maturing. During that time he closely monitored the beer’s flavor development. Approximately one year after the fruit addition he determined it was mature and ready for kegging. The wine barrel produced roughly three half-barrel kegs of finished beer.

On tap now

You’ll find Peach Folk Funk on tap now at Bad Shepherd Beer Co. in Charleston. As a special treat, Ross is taking a sixtel of the beer to pour at Saturday’s (Aug. 9) Rails & Ales beer festival in Huntington.

Isn’t it great seeing West Virginia brewers experimenting and succeeding in making beers that are nationally competitive. Cheers to Ross and to all our other West Virginia brewers who push the beer envelope into wooden barrels and pull out odes of joy.

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* Photos by Ross Williams