We love to make all kinds of barrel-aged wild beers, and some of the more special releases are heavily fruited with whole, unpasteurized fruit. There is nothing quite like a wild beer made with whole ripe fruit. Whenever possible we partner with local Alberta farms and also British Columbia producers. Sometimes, we use high-quality fruit purees because of seasonality restraints, but we never use flavourings in any of our beer.

Working with whole fruit is notoriously labour intensive - it's perishable, and the season for ripe whole fruit is incredibly tight. You really have to drop everything and deal with the fruit as soon as it's ready. When whole ripe fruit shows up at our doorstep, we're not the boss, the fruit is the boss!

On more than one occasion, our brewery family has spent whole days pitting and de-stemming delightful organic fruit by hand.

Not many breweries work with whole fruit, mostly because whole fruit is not sterile. It has wild yeast and bacteria on the skins of the fruit, but for us, that's perfect! It adds diversity to our existing house wild culture and develops novel aromas and flavours during the subsequent fermentation on the fruit.

Our barrel-aged wild beers use quite a different process from most sour beer on the market today. Our beers draw roots from traditional Belgian brewing traditions where the beer is fermented first and then slowly soured and aged over many months in the barrels. In the cases of our barrel-aged wild beers that have fruit added, the beers typically spend about 6-10 months in the barrels and then are re-fermented with fruit in the barrels for a few more months. This refermentation turns all of the sugars in the fruit into alcohol, and unique flavours, leaving jammy and juicy fruit flavours behind. This fruitiness pairs exceptionally well with the rustic aroma from our house cultures during barrel ageing. In some cases, the beer isn't sour before we add the fruit; the natural cultures on the fruit skins do the souring work for us.

We draw a lot of inspiration from historical brewing techniques, but historic doesn't have to mean boring. Many Belgian barrel-aged beer producers use an insane amount of fruit in their beers, up to 30% by weight of beer! This creates an experience that's more like drinking liquid fruit than anything else. Heavy fruiting rates pair exceptionally well with the base beer's funky, rustic, and sour notes, often enhancing the fruit-forward experience. Depending on the intensity of the fruit, more or less of it may be required to reach a desired level of fruitiness. For example, Ruby My Dear — our blend of red sour beers with Raspberries has over 20% of its weight in raspberries, although when working with Peaches, fruiting rates upward of 35% are possible.

Over the past few months, we've been working with all kinds of great fruit like sour cherries, nectarines, peaches, apricots, and blackberries. Some of the stone fruit beers this year have fruiting rates close to 40%. Right now, the fruiting season is coming to a close, and all of our whole fruit is now sleeping soundly, re-fermenting with our barrel-aged wild beer. Although you won't see the fruits of our labour for a few more months yet, make sure you keep your eyes peeled for those (and other barrel-aged releases) this fall/winter. #wildbeertakestime