NEIN: Nine Years of Positive Negation

Reflecting on nine years of serving beer (and ten years of business), I’m glad to have adopted more principles than I’ve abandoned. From what I’ve witnessed, principles abandoned do not seem to be easily recaptured.

Principles are out of vogue, maybe. Principles are try-hard, principles are a luxury. If there’re no atheists in foxholes, perhaps people believe there are no principled businesses in recessions?

Saying no is liberatory. Constraints, paradoxically, tend to set free. Frost famously said, "I'd as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down,” and there is undoubtedly a degree to which self-imposed structures maximize possible spontaneity therein. Think of chess, of jazz, of an unmolested barrel of beer or wine. All composed to be so set free.

So, no:

Cultured Yeast or Bacteria

What is spontaneous fermentation? It’s what happens to any sugar solution absent human intervention, whether apple juice to cider, grape juice to wine, refrigerator orange juice left too long, or wort to beer. It requires only our complete abstention from adding yeast and/or bacterial cultures. This does not mean that yeast or bacteria are not present in the beer (they very evidently are!), it just mean that they are naturally existent in the environment where inoculation and fermentation take place.

To ensure proper and successful spontaneous fermentations we employ a coolship as the evental site of spontaneous inoculation via ambient air, and well-cleaned (165-180F pressurized water) barrels to house the wort’s fermentation into beer.

Pasteurization

“Pasteur played around in stale beer. Not very promising material, what? He also damn near starved. He advanced “pure” bacteriology. But why oppose him? That to me is the perennial disgust with people. Why not welcome him?”

              -William Carlos Williams

We welcome the Arboisien man himself and his science that has profoundly changed the world, probably for the better. Upon the discovery, however, that every cubic inch of our soil, water, and air are teeming with microbes, too many have sought violent remediation, believing sterility both possible and beneficial. It rarely is, and modern and future science need to square nature’s abhorrence of a vacuum (or sterile atmosphere) with the experimental method’s abhorrence of variables.

Pasteurization is the killing of all life in a given substance. For a large dairy operation to safely package milk for fresh consumption, this is an obvious public health necessity. For a fermented beer, wine or cider with pH and alcohol content inhospitable to all known pathogens, pasteurization becomes simply an industrial corner-cutting measure. It needlessly cooks the life out of the beverage, and ensures that the beverage will never improve, only rapidly degrade.

Chemical Corrections

(sulfites,  sorbates, citric acid, et al.)

Most of the more common chemical additions to beer or wine are administered as “preservatives,” but natural fermentations have no lack of natural preservatives: low pH, alcohol, antioxidant properties of lees, dissolved CO2. Embracing these positive aspects makes the rejection of further chemical temptations rather easy.

In brewing, water profiles are often chemically manipulated to help achieve desired results. In our first brewing season we added some gypsum and calcium chloride to our brewing water out of a general insecurity that we quickly outgrew. Since brewing on our own system, we use only our own undoctored well water. It is common but not universal for lambic brewers to artificially acidify their wort with lactic acid. We have never done this and tend to prefer the complexity of lambics produced from those fewer brewers who abstain from the practice.

Sulfites, sorbates, etc. are explicitly added to suppress microbial activity. Fermentation is one of the greatest gifts to humanity, it is nature’s preservative and creates mindbending arrays of flavors and aromas that the laboratory cannot replicate.

Enzymes

Enzymes (like lactic acid above) are created naturally during the brewing and fermentation process; adding exogenous enzymes is a probably innocuous fermentation shortcut in which we have no interest.

Lactose

An early phone note of referential punning titles to thieve for our cuvees includes: Under Milk Wood, lactose lambic. Thankfully we have never; will likely never.

Kettle-souring

Probably the most common process in the production of “sour beer,” it is antithetical to our aims. It generally entails holding wort in the kettle and adding lactobacillus to singularly create acidity, then reheating the kettle to kill all microbes present (see: pasteurization), and proceeding with a quick conventional fermentation. At best, these can produce clean and monotonous sour beers that could theoretically introduce drinkers to the concept of pleasant beer acidity at a low entry cost. More frequently the refiring of the kettle ensures permanent off-flavors created during the souring process, but that can no longer be remediated by microbes over time, having been pasteurized into oblivion.

Our Berliner Messe series employs a spontaneous pre-acidification (no culture added) in which the wort is held warm at temperatures hospitable to lactobacillus prior to proper spontaneous alcoholic fermentation at the somewhat lower temperatures more hospitable to yeast, all without any microbial massacre by extreme heat.

Brite Tanks & Forced Carbonation

Most bubbly beverages are carbonated by the direct injection of CO2 into the liquid. The process is relatively quick and predictable, and results in inferior bubbles. The most common vessel for carbonating beer is the “brite tank,” a pressurizable vessel into which CO2 is bubbled to be uptaken by the surrounding liquid. For industrial sparkling wine, a similar, more robust vessel would be employed for the Charmat/tank method, with the same results: quicker, more controllable carbonation, at the expense of good taste.

During any yeast fermentation, CO2 is produced, carbonating the liquid. In an open fermentation or barrel fermentation, this CO2 is allowed to escape into the air. We typically allow our beer barrels and fruit refermentations to fully finish as still beers before dosing our (non-pressurizable) bottling tank with local honey to spark a final refermentation in the bottle for carbonation. Not exactly a hot take, but: all of the best beers, sparkling wines and ciders are bottle conditioned.

Foudres

Nothing against foudres in general, these oversize wooden vessels can be positively majestic, we just haven’t used any and have no plans to. Catching txotx at Petritegi and tasting through the cellar of oval foudres at Pierre Frick have certainly convinced me that these behemoths have their place, and in fact we did purchase two cheap old oval foudres that suffered irremediable stave cracks in transit.

The benefit to foudres is also their drawback. There’s a certain efficiency of space and time to a larger vessel that comes at the expense of agility and risk mitigation. We’ve always prized 400-600L puncheons/demi-muids as a perfect midpoint between a standard barrel whose character develops fairly rapidly and a foudre with a slower-paced, more homogenizing effect. The larger the vessel (in our tiny cellar) the lesser the blending opportunities, and in case of oaken disaster, better to lose 500L than 20-50hL (4x-10x).

A pedantic note to our fellow Americans: it’s foeder or foudre, geuze or gueuze. Two different languages’ spellings of the same word, and if the Alsatians aren’t combining the two to form a brand-new misspelling, maybe we oughtn’t to either.  

Filtration

This one’s a little tricky because it’s not like we don’t conduct our bottling without any form of screen in place, but we generally use 100 micron screens as our finest form of filtration. Wines and beers are often filtered down to 1 micron, or even lower in what’s called “sterile filtration” which all but ensures no meaningful life in the bottle. Remember that lees (fine sediment deposit) are antioxidants and preserve the liquid indefinitely. When people tell you grocery store wine isn’t going to age well in your cellar, this is one of many reasons why.

Finings

Often listed alongside filtration, these are process aids that bind with particulate in the beer, resulting in clearer beer. Isinglass (fish bladder), gelatin, and egg white are all fascinating non-vegan-friendly ways to speed up this process that time spent at low temperatures achieves very nicely.

Slushie Machines

There was a slushie machine on the bar of our Barn Bar venue when we bought the property, alas, it had already been sold. A lot of deeply troubled unserious brewers like to make a lot more money than we do by dumping their plentiful past-prime beer in a slushie machine, adding unfathomable amounts of sugar, and collecting from flocking human hummingbirds. Which brings us to…

Backsweetening

There is a reasonable way to sweeten your beer, wine, coffee, or breakfast cereal if you have an irrepressible sweet tooth such that you cannot envision eating or drinking anything that isn’t massively imbalanced with added sugar: add it yourself!

When Lindemans Kriek becomes synonymous with lambic, when The Veil’s explosive cans of primarily fruit puree become synonymous with gose, when Angry Orchard becomes synonymous with cider, when a Frappuccino becomes synonymous with coffee, everyone loses. Once a product is backsweetened, a drinker who prefers it less sweet can perform no alteration to render it more palatable: it’s garbage. But an honest beverage delivered to someone who’s subsisted on an artificially maintained lifelong high-fructose/sucrose diet can still be made suitable by a substantial sugar addition.

Natural fermentation abhors residual sugar, except in the rarest of circumstances.

We have made exceptions to our “no backsweetening” rule, but never to a packaged product for many reasons compiled elsewhere in this list. A couple cask-only modern faros made when we are lucky enough to acquire freshly-pressed icewine juice, blended with our spontaneously fermented golden ale for The Iceman Cometh. And our holiday season mulled beers are sweetened, spiced, and heated for a very different drinking experience. There is of course no logical reason why this is more acceptable to us than turning our beers into slushies! Neither a hill to die on nor a slope to slip down.

“Hard Seltzer”

The Brewers Association really lost us when they thought chasing the “hard seltzer” market was a winning strategy for “craft” brewers. Scare quotes here for emphasis.

Extracts, Flavorings

There’s a company that used to send every licensed brewery a giant box full of sample extracts and flavorings. They still unfortunately may! Artificial flavorings have no place in anything of any quality whatsoever. We’ve never concocted any house-made extracts or tinctures, but those at least have a degree of honesty to them. Vanilla beans, for example, get cut in-house and dropped straight in our beer.

Purées

We eschew purées for the same reasons we prefer not to use frozen fruit. First, you cannot sort or triage fruit for quality the way you can with fresh whole fruit, left instead to the mercy of the usually very large farm operation capable of such processing. And in the puréeing process all the fruit sugar is made accessible far faster (just like the freeze/thaw cycle which breaks down cell walls, juicing rapidly) than in a whole fruit fermentation which fosters a steady and protracted fermentation. We prefer the latter.

Unpaid Labor

Does craft beer need unionization? Probably. Does the US need Universal Basic Income? Probably. In the meantime, we pay greater than average industry wages (and less than we’d like) for labor performed! (An exception: The Referend ownership might sometimes work for free/equity out of belief in this whole big system of beliefs.)

Bezos Dealings

That billionaires murder poor people daily, we’ve covered. Whenever and wherever possible we don’t do business with known homicidal pieces of shit, therefore we don’t buy from Amazon, we refuse to sell to Whole Foods.

Charitably: “The Amish have an idea that goes under the rubric of “No unequal yoke.” They will not become involved in a transaction that includes an entity far larger in scale and scope, an entity that they cannot engage as an equal in the transaction. Our civilization suffers from a yoke so unequal that we can no longer identify the partners in it.” -William Bryant Logan

Serving of Fascists

Pretty well covered by us elsewhere. No quarter given for these fucking ghouls. Armed masked secret police are racially terrorizing American towns and cities with the full power of the fascist state behind them. They said that they would do it, and they are doing it, and everyone complicit needs to fix their hearts or die.

“At a certain moment, when faced with public events, we know that we must refuse. Refusal is absolute, categorical. It does not discuss or voice its reasons. This is how it remains silent and solitary, even when it affirms itself, as it should, in broad daylight. Those who refuse and who are bound by the force of refusal know that they are not yet together. The time of common affirmation is precisely what has been taken away from them. What they are left with is the irreducible refusal, the friendship of this sure, unshakable, rigorous No that unites them and determines their solidarity.

[…]

The theoretical obviously does not consist in elaborating a program or a platform but, on the contrary, outside of any programmatic project and even any project, in maintaining a refusal that affirms, in releasing or maintaining an affirmation that does not come to any arrangement but that undoes arrangements, even its own, since it is related to dis-arrangement or disarray or even the nonstructurable. This decision of refusal is not a power, nor a power to negate, nor negation in relation to an always already posed affirmation. This decision is what we name when we inject spontaneity into the “revolutionary” process, with the proviso that this notion of spontaneity is subject to caution in many respects, as it traffics more than one dubious ideal–for example, a sort of vitalism, natural auto-creativity, etc.”

-Maurice Blanchot

With belief in these dubious ideals, so-called, here’s to the refusal that affirms!