American Beers With a Pungent Whiff of Place<br />Mr. Stuffings has consulted other brewers, and Belgium’s High Council for Artisanal Lambic Beers, to introduce a new certification mark — Méthode Traditionnelle —<br />that Americans can use to market lambic-style beers made according to Belgian tradition.<br />In the coolship, however, the microbes attacking the liquid have never been cultivated — “yeast<br />that either floated in from outside, yeast that was already naturally occurring in this room, yeast that was maybe living in this ceiling,” Mr. Stuffings said.<br />— In a former machine shop here in the Texas Hill Country, Jeffrey Stuffings, a founder of Jester King Brewery, led a tour group<br />up a narrow staircase, to a loft where dozens of oak barrels surrounded what looked like an enormous copper sheet pan.<br />“It is a very romantic and mystical style,” said Levi Funk, of Funk Factory Geuzeria in<br />Madison, Wis. Mr. Funk began filling barrels in 2015 and opened a taproom last June.<br />To ferment most beers, brewers tend a culture of microbes and add it to each batch: typically a “pure culture” of brewer’s yeast, or in the case of many farmhouse and sour beers, like Jester King’s core offerings, a mix<br />that includes yeast and bacteria isolated from the wild.<br />“The coolship kind of creaks and groans.”<br />The miracle of the lambic process — which yields some of the world’s most complex<br />and captivating beers, yet has caught on in America only recently — is what happens next: The beer starts to ferment spontaneously, no starter required.
