Modern Times Oneida Returns In 2014, Southern Lands, Lost Horizon & The Future Of Funk

As has been pointed out to me over on Facebook, it’s been a while since I’ve blogged. This is quite true! Between the enormous effort all of us put into the can launch, and now the enormous effort all of us are putting into our forthcoming Los Angeles/Orange County roll-out, the blog—among other things—has been neglected.

Well, the drought ends here. I’m going to talk about two recent special releases we’ve put out, and some plans for future releases.

First matter of business: Southern Lands. Although this beer will still be on-tap in the tasting room for a while longer, there is only a handful of kegs left in our distributor’s inventory. Apologies for not writing about it sooner.

Anyway, Southern Lands is a 100% Brett Trois IPA featuring Centennial & Calypso hops. It is juicy, citrusy, pineappley, and delicious. It is the consensus around the brewery that Southern Lands was the best of the three 100% Brett Trois beers we made.

I believe the hops and yeast integrated and supported each other better in Southern Lands than in previous attempts, and I think the key was the Centennial. Off-setting the juiciness of the Brett Trois—which is extremely juicy, both in flavor and aroma, even though it is extremely attenuative (i.e. the resulting beer was not sweet since it had almost no residual sugar)—with citrusy hop—rather than doubling down on the juiciness with juicy hops—worked out quite well, in my view. You can find the homebrew recipe here.

Southern Lands will be our last 100% Brett Trois beer for quite some time. We thoroughly enjoyed making those three beers—Neverwhere, Roraima, and Southern Lands—but it’s now time to take the funk tank in a new direction.

And indeed we already have. A batch of Funky Lomaland is already inside said tank. It’s a modified Lomaland malt bill fermented with our Lomaland yeast blend, along with hefty doses of Brett Brux and Brett Trois.

As you’ll remember from Mike’s blog post about Neverwhere, Brett behaves completely differently in the presence of ‘normal’ beer yeast, so the goal here is to produce more ‘traditional’ funky beers. Funky Lomaland is certainly heading in that direction, with a distinct earthy, hay-like funk beginning to emerge.

Happily, Lomaland blend seems to play nicely with funk, and we’re excited to see what we can do with it. We’ll likely keep this pitch going with a series of funky saisons in the coming months, some of which will see time in red and white wine barrels.

Second matter of business: Lost Horizon, our new double IPA featuring Centennial, Chinook, Simcoe, and Calypso hops. It’s definitely on the piney/citrusy/resinous end of the spectrum, quite different from our other hoppy offerings.

And there’s a reason for that. Although I am huge fan of hops that tend towards the fruity end of the spectrum (Citra, Mosaic, Nelson, and Amarillo being my personal faves), not everyone who works at Modern Times has the same preferences.

There were calls for us to make a beer at the other end of the hop spectrum, emphasizing the above-mentioned ‘traditionally’ hoppy characteristics, which generally result from using hop cultivars with Cascade parentage. Being the endlessly empathetic, magnanimous, and deeply humble boss that I am, I allowed it, and Lost Horizon is the happy result. I believe it is very, very good and an exceedingly well-made example of the style.

We have two more hoppy beers on the agenda—Booming Rollers, a Citra-centric IPA; and Protocosmo, a TBD pale ale—but they will likely have to wait until at least January, after we’re done filling the pipeline with our core beers in Los Angeles and Orange County.

That’s all for now. Thanks, as always, for your support!

Cheers & thanks,
Jacob McKean
Modern Times Beer