With St Pats day just around the corner, we're taking this 🍺 Thirsty Thursday🍺 as a perfect opportunity to talk Nitro beers. what is it, how's...
WE HAVE A THIRST FOR GOOD BEER & KNOWLEDGE
Kind of Thursday. Probably Friday. It’s a bloody Zoo around here!
Zoo; it’s Brisbane’s oldest Mixed Culture program, now 14 vintages long, with plenty more in conception.
10 years ago our brewers made their own mixed bag of microorganisms (prepare yourselves for more big words that end in “ism” and “yces” in this one folks).
What started as a “sensory session” ended with a corny keg full of the bottle dregs of their favourite breweries doing wild cultures. We’re talking Boon, Cantillon, Jester King, 3 Fonteinen, Timmermans, Orval and Fantome. Lovingly coddled for months before going into an XPA in local Shiraz and Chardonnay barrels. In 2014 of all things, what a time.
Mixed culture beers are exactly that, beers fermented with many different species of microorganisms to develop flavour depth. While beer is classically made with just one yeast species; saccharomyces, mixed culture beers can have hundreds of individual species, from lactic acid bacteria to wild yeast.
Over the years we’ve tried to focus on styles, species and barrels. Some have been Brettanomyces only, others have been stainless ferment with Saccharomyces followed by a secondary on Lactobacillus and Acetobacter. Some have been in fresh fill wine barrels, others in Brettanomyces infested barrels where we’ve sought interesting cultures without inoculation (for those playing at home, this is a spontaneous ferment with wild yeast - like a lot of wines).
It’s probably one of the coolest things about beer and something we are super proud of. If you know us, you know we love the triangulation of brewing, science and art. Creating something unique and new, pushing boundaries and giving the brewers consistent heart palpitations with cleaning programs. Someone’s gotta do it.
We are currently pouring Zoo 12 - a sour dough wild ale and our incredible latest release Zoo 14 - our thrice blended golden sour using 1, 2 and 3 year old beers. It’s pretty special, worthy of a fancy glass has certainly a couple of sniffs.
We interrupt this weeks 🍺 Thirsty Thursday 🍺 to put rocky montages on repeat and shout CHAMPIONS until we sound like Sylvester Stallone.
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