Allagash Coolship in MA?

I don't have a problem with this. If a tiger is born and raised in captivity, it's still a wild animal. It takes many many generations for it to evolve and become a tabby cat before we can say it's domesticated.

 

I too am generally ok with calling an isolated strain of Brettanomyces a "wild" yeast, but I think it starts to verge on misinformation when a beer fermented with a lab strain gets called a "wild ale." This implies that the beer's fermentation was left to the course of nature when, clearly, it was not.

To continue with your quite apt wild animal analogy, bringing up a wild animal in captivity doesn't make the animal non-wild, but neither does it make its new captive habitat wilderness.

 

Neat.

 

Not to confuse this conversation but Allagash's house brett strain was isolated from the area surrounding their brewery. Maybe you knew that. It has the spirit of spontaneity by fermenting with the region's wild yeast.

 

Very cool, I actually didn't know that. I knew that New Glarus did something similar for their R&D "Gueuze", although I think in that case Dan threw in more microflora than just Brett. Anyhow, I still think it's fair to maintain a distinction between an inoculated beer and a spontaneous one, and that the popularization of the "wild" terminology has made this distinction confusing for many.

First world problems, I know. Cheers!

 

Had FV-13 on tap at Vee Vee over the weekend and really liked it. Glad they are distributing bottles.

 

I know the first gueuze was spontaneously fermented next to a barn or something. It was blended with a little bit of a normally fermented sour that didnt turn out so well. That story could possibly be flipped because I dont remember so well.

 

FV13: tomorrow.