BENJAMIN RASMUSSEN for WIRED
What is the very best beer you've ever tasted? How far would you go to re-engineer it, if it were lost?
In Wired Magazine this month, William Bostwick's profile of the guys behind Allagash Brewing Company, and a quest to re-create a legendary brew. The first two grafs hint at the fermentation and fun that lies within:
A FEW MILES north of Portland, Maine, inside Allagash Brewing Company's gleaming fluorescent-lit beer factory, a heavy door leads into a climate-controlled room lined with barrels full of aging beer. Past those barrels, behind a second, smaller door, is one of craft brewing's most sacred spaces. In here, the thrumming industrial drone of bottling lines and keg washers fades away. Wooden casks stand silent sentry. Dust hangs heavy. Cobwebs lilt. The owner of Allagash, Rob Tod, sets a small green bottle of beer on an upturned cask. Its contents were aged in this very room. He pops the cork and pours a fragrant, foamy measure into a yellow plastic KOA coffee mug.
It's called Resurgam—Latin for "I shall rise again"—and it is the most remarkable beer I've ever tasted: vibrant, alive with sweet white-pear notes, a clean, tart razor's edge, and a subtle berry finish. It is at once fruity and earthy, rich and light, hazy and bright—strawberries in hay under a summer sun. Complex and graceful, Resurgam and the rare few beers like it represent a style of beer that's flatly, even belittlingly, called sour.
My Quest to Reengineer a Legendary Beer in a Dirty Kitchen [wired.com]
Lambic fermenting in barrels. WIRED
