Dogfish Head's newest release may be its 'wildest' yet

The culinary world knows the funk: Ripe stinky cheeses, goopy fermented fish and tangy kimchi have curled noses and watered mouths for centuries.

Now, as wild and sour suds dominate the craft scene, Dogfish Head wants to sip the funk with its newest passion project, “Wooden…It be nice!”, a cork-finished wild beer program set to release its first ale on Saturday, Sept. 29, at the Milton brewery.

KnottyBits (8.2 percent ABV), a wild ale puckering with sweet and sour cherries and rhubarb, was a localized labor of love: The rhubarb KnottyBits aged on came from Fifer Orchards, and then Twist, a juice bar in Rehoboth, closed shop early one day to help Dogfish juice 120 pounds of the perennial vegetable.

The 375ml bottles are $10 a pop, and 2,000 will be up for grabs this weekend.

The wild ale project truly began over a decade ago, when founder Sam Calagione returned from a trip to Belgium. The sour beer production there so inspired Calagione that he decided to make his own, resulting in an award-winning wild peach ale dubbed Festina Lente.

“(Sam) was like, ‘Yeah, I nailed it, and that was a lot of fun, now back to IPAs,’ ” Bill Marchi said, laughing.

But in the 12 years since Festina Lente, craft beer trends took a sharp turn toward sours and beer brewed with funky yeast.

A few days before KnottyBits’ release, Marchi, Dogfish Head’s brewing supervisor who is leading the “Wooden…It be nice!” program, made his way past Dogfish’s distillery and into an older, dimly lit part of the warehouse.

A couple of brewers were smoothing out KnottyBits labels by hand onto heavy, champagned-fashioned bottles, and painting each with a bright green stripe — an ode to Belgian brewers.

The wild beer program is a no-frills operation.

“We have a drain, we have water, and we have a bunch of barrels,” Marchi said.

Fizzy vapors escaped when Marchi popped open a bottle of KnottyBits, not unlike bubbly. Creamy pink poured out.

“You should get a lot of funk from the Brettanomyces,” Marchi said.

The yeast used to brew KnottyBits and other wild beers is from a genus called Brettanomyces, which has many strains, some more funky or earthy or tropical than others.

And unlike regular beers, the yeast does the talking: For Wet Hop American Summer (7.75 percent ABV), another student of the wild beer program set for a November release, the Brettanomyces transforms the wet hops’ aromatic compounds, making the brew “super tropical,” brewmaster Mark Safarik said.

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In mid-December, the brewery will release Eastern Seaboard, a wild ale (8 percent ABV) brewed with blackberries and Eastern Shore beach plums. Seaboard is naturally violet in color, jammy, tart and dry. 

To avoid contamination — and thus, a sour beer apocalypse — the 550 barrels currently in “Wooden…it be nice!” are kept far from tamer ales like 60 Minute IPA.

Most Dogfish brews are made with Saccharomyces yeast, a typical beer yeast Marchi describes as “very dog.”

“It’s obedient, you can train it, you know what to expect every time, and you’re going to get the same results,” he explained.

In this part of the warehouse, though, “it’s like working with a cat,” Marchi said, “a lot of times even a feral cat.”

Leave some food out and the yeast might come around (or not). Maybe it wants a cuddle. Other times it will scratch your face off. The cat characteristic of Brettanomyces makes it difficult to predict a release date, and the program itself will lose 10 to 20 percent of its barrels, which Marchi said is standard since each one is so unique.

“Every group of barrels is an experiment,” Safarik added.

The process of making a funky beer starts like any other: Make the wort (basically sugar water), then brew several barrels at a time. There begins the fork in the road, when the batch is transferred to a mixed fermentation filter with wild yeast.

The batch then goes into freshly emptied chardonnay barrels, where it sits for a year, untouched.

The longer wild yeast like Brettanomyces sits, “the more stuff it does,” Safarik said. “It’s quite an amazing zombie yeast. Brettanomyces can sit in a barrel for a year, and you give it a little food and it’ll come right back to life. I don’t know how or why. It just does.”

Both KnottyBits and Wet Hop are fermented with a farmhouse ale yeast, but KnottyBits was poured over fresh fruit and rhubarb juice, soaking up the flavors for a month and a half, while Wet Hop went directly onto the hops.

The brew is finally capped but must go through an additional fermentation in the bottle, which is primed with yeast and sugar. That last step creates the effervescence, high level of carbonation and silky mouthfeel of champagne, Marchi said.

“To me, that’s the most critical part of the process,” he said.

Four to eight weeks later, the funk is ready to drop.

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