Cervino Update

Two years ago I started an experiment of blurring beer and wine together, dubbed Cervino, by blending Chardonnay juice with spontaneous beer.  This last year's season we continued it by trying a couple more grape varieties, but by also focusing on incorporating wine techniques and was very encouraged by the evolution of Cervino.  For these larger batches, we blend barrels of already aged spontaneous beer together, and then add either whole grapes, or the juice after pressing grapes.  (Ferment the beer, add grapes, secondary ferment.)

I've wanted to experiment with the timing of fermenting the parts versus when they get combined.  What impact does it have to ferment the grapes alone and then blend it with fermented beer?  Or what about adding grapes to wort and doing primary together?  There are endless iterations of the same ingredient combination, and that's what excites me the most about the Cervino project.

This last season we were able to test out a few areas on interest.  We sourced 4 different local grape varieties and built a punchdown barrel for each of them.  The punchdown technique has been amazing in our fruited lambics.  Given that it's a wine technique, it only makes sense to bring that into the Cervino series.  To make the punch downs legal, and to help kick off fermentation, we added 5% Meerts beer to each barrel.  Punching the grapes down twice daily during fermentation brought out so much flavor, aroma, and crazy color for the two reds.  After fermentation we tasted each, experimented with blends of each other, with blends with spontaneous barrels, and in the end dumped one barrel and blended and packaged the other three.  Bluebell was the grape variety we dumped.  It wasn't bad, it just wasn't something we were excited about.  The other three were blended with 18 month old spontaneous barrels and bottle conditioned.

The three pictured above are the 3 we packaged.  La Crescent is "White".  King of the North is "Red".  Frontenac Gris is "Rosé" because the grapes themselves were a pinkish color.  It's really hard to explain the richness and complexity of flavor in these Cervinos.

After the Cervino Sangiovese, we expected the King of the North variety to result in a similarly rich and bold beer.  To our surprise, it drinks closer to the profile you'd expect from a traditional white wine.  It's quite delicate, but has the tannins you'd expect and a bright fruity flavor.  The Frontenac Gris resulted in a super funky and fruity aroma, and the flavor is very bold.  It's one part tropical fruit juice and another part this marriage of oak spice and rich earthy minerality.  The result of the La Crescent surprised us all in how clean and sophisticated a beer can be coming from a raw and seemingly uncouth fermentation process.  A clean, pure brett funk with strong citrus and floral notes.

I speak about Cervino as a project and one that is evolving.  This is certainly the next evolution. Unfortunately, these pilot batches are quite small and so bottles will only be available to the public for on-premise consumption at the taproom.

Working Title - Cervino

I'm a huge fan of what grapes bring to lambic (and sour beers in general). In my mind, the flavor profile of lambic is more akin to wine than it is regular beer. Adding grapes just further blurs that line and it's so fun to see people's reaction to that experience.

Experimenting in this blurred region of beer and wine is fascinating to me. I want to push this to the legal limit and create something that is as much wine as it is beer. It also opens a new world of wine techniques that I can incorporate into beer. On the wine side there are a near endless combination of grape varieties, using whole grapes, crushed grapes, or juice. One could add the grapes right to the wort and have them primary together. Or add juice to already fermented beer. Ferment them separately and then blend. Oak aging. Pump over and Punch down. Délestage. MLF. On lees/off lees. Carbonic maceration. And on and on and on...

What do we call something like this? It's not right to call it a fruited sour ale. My working title for this has been "Cervino" (an amalgamation of cervisia and vino). Maybe Méthode de Vin? Domaine Flou? This is a style name, not an individual beer. There is so much that can be done in this blurred region, so this is my call out to other breweries (and homebrewers), let's start exploring!

I know some breweries have already played close to this territory, so I'll define what I'm looking for. This new style I'm proposing, while legally beer, is 51% beer and 49% grape/wine. The purpose of this style is to create something that, from an experiential basis, can not be defined as simply "a beer" or "a wine". And, much like the "pét-nat" style, this can look/taste/feel very different from example to example, but they all share a common core.

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My first venture into style is a blend of sour ale base that spontaneously fermented and aged for 6 months.  I then went to Wollersheim winery and picked up some Chardonnay juice.

Arriving to Funk Factory with Chardonnay juice to blend. (Instagram)

The aged sour ale and Chardonnay juice were blended in equal parts allowing the yeast from the beer to ferment the juice.  This has aged for another 2 months and will be bottled in the next month.

What I like about this beer is the connection to the seasons.  The beer was brewed in the winter when spontaneous fermentation is possible.  The wine juice was added at grape harvest.  It is something that I can, and will, repeat each year and it becomes part of that season.  It is also a great "base" to start at. From here I can look at incorporating different wine techniques and judge their impact.