October 28, 2022

270: Sapwood Cellars Puts Research Into Creative Practice With Hoppy and Wild Beers

1 hour 10 minutes

What do you get when Michael Tonsmiere, aka The Mad Fermentationist, and author of the book American Sour Beers joins forces with Scott Janish, author of The New IPA, to start a brewery in a Maryland suburb somewhere between Baltimore and Washington DC? Pretty much what you’d expect—a brewery that tends to focus on creative expressions in the pale ale and IPA space, as well as progressive approaches to wood-aged wild, funky, and sour beers. But Sapwood Cellars has done much more than just meet expectations over their first four years of existence—they’ve also honed approaches to both of these focuses, while creatively blending the two with smart mash-ups in the liminal space between them.

In this episode, the founders of Sapwood discuss:

the evolutionary “royal rumble” process behind their wild and sour beer program

building intensity of flavor and points of difference for more broad experiences

controlling acidity through processes like co-pitching sacch when adding fruit, dry-hopping finished sour beer

multi-step fermentations with wine yeasts

employing more potent hops to hold flavor at lower pH levels

avoiding oxidized hop flavors in sour beer through careful barrel preparation

aggressive rousing despite cold dry hop temperatures in hoppy beers

using hops with high survivables on the hot side

maximizing thiols with new yeasts

finding synergies in hops that produce more than just “generic” tropical flavors

the problem with Galaxy hops

And more.

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