Jester King – Omniscience & Proselytism

Combining fruit and beer has become somewhat of a common practice among modern brewers, but the way this is most often done involves adding fruit, juice, concentrate, or even artificial fruit flavors to filtered or pasteurized beer. As a result, the fruit flavors in the beer remain static and do not have the potential to exceed the sum of their parts. Refermentation with fruit is a different process. The fruit is put in contact with living microorganisms in the beer that break down sugars and create new flavor and aroma compounds. This is why wine doesn’t taste like grape juice. The fruit flavors are transformed through fermentation and have the potential to become unique, complex and quite delicious.

When we referment mature, sour beer with fruit, our end goal is to produce a very dry beer that is unique to the microflora in our barrel room. We introduce the fruit to a diverse combination of organisms — namely Farmhouse yeast, Brettanomyces yeast, souring bacteria, and wild yeast native to our land in the Texas Hill Country. The microorganisms consume the sugars from the fruit to create new flavors and aromas. The result is a flavor profile with a sense of place unique to our brewery in the Hill Country.

Strawberries from Fredericksburg, Texas refermenting in an oak barrel with mature sour beer