Terroir Project: Texas Syrah
Jester King Brewery

Terroir Project is collaborative endeavor organized by our friends at Firestone Walker Brewing Co. in Paso Robles, California. It involves stretching the limits between wine and beer by co-fermenting 51% wort with 49% native grapes.

This co-mingling of "grains and grapes" represented a fun new approach for us. We typically take mature, barrel-aged beer and referment it with grapes. In this case, we blended wort and grapes together at the outset of fermentation and let them co-ferment. This simultaneous approach yielded some really interesting and exciting results that we're very happy to share!

Our wort consisted of pilsner malt and wheat, and our grapes were native-grown Syrah from northeast Texas (Sulphur Bluff). We racked the blend of wort and grapes into oak barrels for a slow fermentation that lasted 10 months. Our Head Brewer Averie Swanson writes, "The finished beer is really nice! Very wine-like and dusty. The oak presents as vanilla and integrates nicely into the beer. It has a lovely pink color!”