February 20, 2018 – What do you do when your friend is thirsty for a little local craft beer, but you’d rather have wine? Well Humble Sea Brewing may have the answer. It’s a brand new beer-wine hybrid drink made with grape pomace from Beauregard Vineyards. A delicious rosé version debuted at Twisted Tasting last weekend, and the brewery plans to release a heftier Vin Syrah version on Friday.
“It’s a neat little creature,” says Shane Winkler, of his latest project, a barrel-aged beer using Syrah wine grapes. Winkler is the barrel program director at Humble Sea Brewing Co. in Santa Cruz, and he is pretty happy with how this beer-meets-wine concept turned out. “I’m itching to do it again,” he says.
The use of wine grapes in beer is nothing new. Plenty of brewers have done similar batches, with a variety of grapes and techniques. Winkler came across his first example of this in 1999 when Dogfish Head released their “Midas Touch,” a beer/wine/mead hybrid that was the first beer in the Delaware brewery’s Ancient Ales series.
“It is something that’s been on my radar for awhile,” says Winkler. So after completing a brewing apprenticeship program in 2014 at Jester King in Austin, Texas, a place where spontaneous fermentation, mixed culture and local farm-grown ingredients are highly regarded, Winkler wanted to give it a go here in our California wine country.
The initial plan was to source whole grapes, but that didn’t come through as he had hoped. So in a scramble to find other options as the base beer was already fermenting, they sent out a few emails to see what might result. Ryan Beauregard saved the day with an offer of grape pomace he had leftover from his own winemaking at Beauregard Vineyards, three different varieties in fact. “We found good research to support using pomace, so in lieu of missing the year, we went ahead and grabbed it. We feel like we got really good results…there’s just a ton of flavor that is left,” says Winkler. They did different experimental passes with Pinot Noir, a mixed red blend, and Syrah pomace varietes, and the Syrah ended up being the best result.
If you know any winemakers, as most of us do here in wine country, you know that they like to drink beer. So despite any apprehension about what could be a controversial wine/beer crossover, it is unlikely anyone will hold a protest. “Wine is loaded territory, it is very revered here. It is important to keep that balance. We are not trying to make wine with beer as a liquid,” Winkler says.
He explains, “In a nutshell what we’re talking about is incorporating wine grapes, or in our case wine pomace, into beer to create a finished product that possesses flavor characteristics of both. There are a number of breweries making these and as many different processes, but we’re basically just adding crushed grapes to a fermenting or finished beer to extract the sugars or flavors like we would with raspberries or other fruit. With our beer, we used a finished base beer that was aged 4-5 months in used French oak Pinot Noir wine barrels. Two wine barrels were converted into upright tanks to hold the beer and pomace. We held the beer and pomace together for three weeks to extract flavor, color, and tannins. Like in winemaking, we did daily punch downs and blanketed the top of the tanks with Co2 to hold off unwanted microbial growth. At the end of the three weeks we removed the now very purple and intensely wine-flavored beer and used another barrel of the same base beer to blend a beer that we hope was a good representation of both.”
If you want to try this, be sure to set yourself a reminder for this Friday, February 23 at noon. That is when Humble Sea opens on Fridays and will release their Vin Syrah. Because the end result was only one single wine barrel, there is not much to go around. Winkler predicts only 200 bottles will be available, so it will sell out for sure. “It’s a really small batch of beer, but I think it’s really good,” Winkler admits. If you happen to miss the boat on this one, though, don’t worry. The Humble Sea team plans to keep concocting in the same vein. “White grapes are also on our radar next year, I’m really excited to work with Reisling if I can get my hands on it,” says Winkler.
And he has some final advice to keep in mind. “I want people to think about the temperature they are drinking the beer at. Somebody was cracking a joke that the worst thing to say is ‘ice cold beer.’ When it is too cold, you are killing the aromatics, especially for this one with the wine characteristics. I would actually pull it out for a little while, let it warm up to the mid 50s, and the beer will represent much, much better. We put a lot of work trying to construct a lot of these complex, layered flavors. Go slow, let your body warm that liquid up in the glass.”
About the author
Amber Turpin is a freelance food and travel writer based in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
