Wildflower Foudre Beer #2 (Sparkling)

REGION: Marrickville, NSW 
SIZE: 750ml / ABV: 5.3%

Citrus the hero, lemons and lime jump from the glass on the nose. There’s dusty brown spice touched by funk. Oak still plays its part giving woodiness and depth. Surprisingly more savoury than the still. Whilst the citrus core remains alongside the dried stone fruits sit nicely with the oak. Textually there’s breadth and volume but it’s laden with vinous oak spice and vanilla. Aged citrus and apple skin on the finish.

"Its release has been long in the making, spending over four years ageing in a single barrel, due to our decision in 2018 to attempt a non-human-inoculated fermentation, ie a lambic-practice-inspired and that fermentation throwing all the expected curveballs which only time can heal. To Mike's absolute credit, he never once questioned my desire to keep holding onto it and letting it get to where I thought it might end up. The proof is in the pudding, as they say, and in Foudre Beer #2 we have an incredibly vinous beer with silky texture unlike anything we have released before. So fascinating were the barrel samples, we bottled a portion of this beer without dosage to give you an idea and the opportunity to compare what carbonation does to a drink of this age.

To the technicals, the beer was brewed with NSW grown Schooner barley and raw wheat (this was about 1 year before any organic barley for malting was even grown in Australia). Hopped with fresh Motueka and Saaz, we decidedly did not go down the aged hop route in an effort to highlight the fermentation pathways instead of the strong, potentially overbearing characteristics of aged hops. The wort was transported, carefully, to Wildflower very hot... I'm talking north of 90C where we assembled a variety of sanitary open-top vessels to let the wort chill overnight and drop to fermentation temperatures. The next day, the wort was transferred into that single Foudre and remained, ageing, for, four, years. The sparkling portion was krausened into life by using wort from our next edition of this beer, Foudre Beer #3 which was scheduled to be brewed a day before #2 was bottled to attempt this practice." - Topher 

It's difficult to overstate the impact of Wildflower since its inception only a few years ago in 2017. Hailing from Texas, Topher Boehm has an impressive resume - from Brasserie Thiriez to Jester King to his background in astrophysics - not to mention his unique house yeast. Cultivated from foraged wildflowers native to NSW, think wattle blossoms and banksia, blended with a Belgian saison strain, creating something truly individual which speaks of place. Topher even sprayed the entire brewery with inoculated wort when he moved in, just to make sure everything was literally covered in the house culture.