Capping a 7 year experiment in fermentation, farming, cellaring, bottling and engineering- we are bringing you the Devil’s and Tahoma (The beer formerly known as Rainier) Kriek in bottles. We have a very limited supply, as we squirrelled away some of the draft beer that was released in 2013. We subsequently aged the beer another 6 months, then blended a tiny portion of young fermenting beer and champagne style bottle conditioned for an additional fermentation inside the bottle. About 160 cases of Tahoma exist and 260 cases of The Devil’s. Some cases will deliver to the great bottle shops in Oregon, California, and Washington, but most will be sold here in Hood River. Opening day is February 8, 11:30am. There is a limit of one case per customer. Click here to see a video of the Double Mountain Kriek Kamp 2011 The krieks have been a long standing project for me for years. I have always felt the Hood River Valley was especially poised to make fruit beers in the lambic-style. Hood River is a cornucopia of fresh tree fruit, and I took over an orchard here in 1999 with the thought of starting a winery. Better heads prevailed (my knowledge base of wine vs. beer is a large chasm) and I kept the orchard in fruit production and started a brewery instead. Praise the alcohol gods, I think that was the right call. I have also planted cider apples at the orchard, but that is a future discussion. We have made this beer for 6 straight years in mostly the same way. We start the brew in June and then add cherries from my orchard in July along with a wild Brettanomyces yeast and ferment for a full year on the whole fruit. The krieks are then released at around cherry harvest just as we are making the next year’s beer. The first year, I was very nervous about the Brett fermentation and pulled the beer off the cherries in March as the cellar started to warm up and the Brett started to assert itself. That particular wild yeast throws a distinctive earthy funk and a light acidity and tartness to the beer that dries the beer out quite nicely. It can take months to develop and is the scourge of the wine industry and the praise of the brewers in Belgium. Subsequent years, as my tolerance for tartness increased, I gave the Brett additional time to develop on the fruit. As the spring temps come up, so does our cellar, and the fermentation moves forward with new vigor. The timing of the Brett addition has varied almost every year. We have been continually tweaking the fermentation to find the optimum flavor development of this beer, using the Brett to add the sourness that is traditionally added from a Belgian sour cherry. Each producer approaches this beer differently, some add sweetness back into the beer with artificial sugar, we won’t do that. This particular beer was brewed in 2012 (hence the 2012 vintage on the label) with the cherries from that harvest. The first pour of that beer was last summer and as I mentioned we held some beer for this bottling experiment. The bottle was a full research experiment on its own. Since I wanted to undergo a champagne style secondary fermentation (actually its third fermentation) and wanted to get some nice carbonation in the bottle, I wanted a heavier glass bottle that could withstand those higher pressures. I also felt a champagne stopper cork wasn’t the best closure and wanted a traditional beer crown. I searched far and low for that bottle, but it simply didn’t exist, so we had a bottle made to our specifications. We also got to choose the recipe for the glass color so we employed a very deep dark antiqued glass giving supreme UV protection. I had the bottle checked with a brewery friend of mind and we compared the light pass-through for our bottle, our standard 500 ml bottle, and a standard brown Amber bottle (non-returnable crushed glass). The new kriek bottle had the least amount of light pass through and offers the best protection against UV degradation. (Our standard bottle was also excellent, but not quite as excellent as the 375ml champagne split bottle.) I truly believe the krieks were destined to be best in the bottle. I have always pronounced draft beer as the best way to appreciate a beer, but I may disagree on these two beers. There will be some of you that age this beer. I want to be perfectly clear on this point- my goal is to age a beer to its perfection at the brewery and when it leaves the brewery, it is ready to drink. Having said that, this beer may improve with additional aging, it may not. There are live active yeasts (about a zillion of them) from the wild microflora on the cherry skins, and our house yeast, and Brettanomyces that will continue to work their magic. Should you choose to age the beer, please age properly, in the dark, at a constant temperature. I would recommend 40-50F as perfect. We were able to secure some more tanks for the 2013 vintage, I expect there will be more of the Devil’s Kriek in late summer, early winter depending on how the beer is doing in our aging cellars. Please enjoy, share it with your friends, I wish I had more, believe me I do. Here are my brewer tasting notes I gave our staff for the beer- This year we celebrate the return of the Devil’s and Tahoma Kriek. These Belgian-style sour ales combine the tart Brettanomyces wild yeast with fresh fruit picked from Matt’s orchard up in Duke’s Valley, just 7 miles south of Hood River. The Devil’s Kriek boasts 200 lbs of Bing cherries with a Flanders Red style Belgian ale, while the lighter colored Tahoma Kriek utlizes the delicate Rainier cherry with a strong Belgian blond ale (Tahoma … Continue reading
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