What should beer taste like?

By Phil Mellows

Over Mayday weekend, 30 pubs and bars across the country, from Koelschip Yard in Glasgow to Vessel Beer Shop in Plymouth to Beer Hatch in Norwich, will be hosting Duration Brewery’s Great Farmhouse Exploration. If you can get to one of these venues, or more, it’s a brilliant opportunity to taste your way through a variety of beers that lie outside the mainstream styles.

Modern farmhouse, or mixed fermentation, brews take inspiration from the ways ales were made before industrial processes and stable yeast strains came on the scene. If you’re used to drinking regular pints down the pub, they can challenge your very idea of what beer should taste like, often tart and complex, laced with unexpected flavours.

Degrees of sourness come from the use of wild and Brettanomyces yeasts. Don’t let that put you off. I remember my first taste of a sour beer, at the Cantillon lambic brewery in Brussels, which was probably a good place to start. It was a shock, but after a while my palate adjusted to the intense sensations running around my mouth. It was different, all right. I wasn’t sure what my drinking mates would make of it. But I knew it was something special that I would keep coming back to.

Another characteristic of farmhouse beers is that they need time to mature. They might be aged for many months in oak barrels, which makes them relatively expensive. But you have the reassurance that the brewer is a real enthusiast and certainly not in it for a quick turnaround.

Instead of relying on hops to deliver flavour, these beers sometimes draw on ingredients foraged from the surrounding countryside, giving them a kind of terroir. At least that’s always been the philosophy at Duration, hidden away in a remote and luxuriant corner of north Norfolk.

Its Farmhouse Exploration will showcase four styles of farmhouse beer. There’s a grisette, which originated on the France-Belgium border, a light and refreshing relative of the more familiar saison; a raspberry gose, a slightly salty German brew; a lime wheat beer; and a continental pale that adds a tart edge to the hops.

That gives you some idea of the variety you can find in farmhouse ales, and Duration is also bringing lambics and lagers to the event, alongside hoppy pales.

If that gives you a taste to explore further, Little Earth Fest is coming up on the first weekend in July. Hosted by Suffolk’s Little Earth Project and its pub, the Edwardstone White Horse, it will feature seasonal styles and beers with foraged and local ingredients from an impressive line-up of specialist brewers.

You can also visit breweries dedicated to the farmhouse arts. Balance Brewing & Blending in Manchester has quickly established itself at the forefront of experimentation in this field and on May 10 its taproom will stage the launch of three intriguing beers made in collaboration with Pellicle magazine: a pink wine-like brew fermented on damson stones; a beer infused with spent gin botanicals from the White Peak Distillery in Derbyshire; and a fresh-hopped saison.

And to plug a personal favourite for you to look out for, Burning Sky Brewers & Blenders in Sussex gave me a taste for saisons, which I was previously unsure about, thanks to its aptly seasonal brews Saison Le Printemps and Saison Ete. It does a host of other adventurous styles, too.

So there’s much to explore in farmhouse – and you don’t even need to put your wellies on.

Photo courtesy Duration Brewing