Wiley Roots Releases Bing Cherry Spontaneous

GREELEY, CO - Wiley Roots Brewing Company will release its first spontaneously fermented beer on October 1, 2018. This release comes in celebration after winning their second medal for the brewery’s mixed culture program at the Great American Beer Festival. This year’s Silver medal for Citra Dry Hopped Funk Yo Couch marks back-to-back success at the Great American Beer Festival for the brewery’s mixed culture program, adding to last year’s Gold medal for Galaxy Dry Hopped Funk Yo Couch.

Wiley Roots’ mixed-culture program features beers fermented with traditional brewer’s yeast, wild yeast and bacteria, and spontaneously fermented beers that are all aged in various environments. The entire program includes over 160 oak barrels, eight stainless steel solera tanks, and two Italian foeders. Funk Yo Couch is the most popular beer in the brewery’s mixed-culture program and is released seasonally using rotating hop varieties. The base of the beer starts as a French saison that is inoculated with a blend of wild captured native yeast and bacteria from Greeley, Colorado. The beer is then fermented and aged in stainless steel. Funk Yo Couch is unique as one of the first Colorado produced mixed-culture beers packaged in cans.

Spontaneous fermentation is a key element of the brewery’s mixed-culture program. This process involves traditional Belgian sour beer production methods and techniques. These techniques include the use of a turbid mash schedule, a grist bill comprised of high protein malts and dextrins, the use of aged hops, and boiling for a minimum of four hours. Once the pre-fermented beer has undergone these steps, it is then transferred at near boiling temperatures to a holding vessel outside of the building and allowed to cool naturally overnight. This outdoor rest captures native yeast and bacteria that ferment the beer in neutral oak barrels, imparting a sense of time and place with local terroir.

After nearly two years in the making, the brewery is excited to release Bing Cherry Spontaneous to the public as the first beer in their spontaneously fermented series. Bing Cherry Spontaneous follows the “Méthode Traditionnelle” requirements (https://methodetraditionnelle.org/standards), with the exception that packaging yeast was used to ensure refermentation in the bottle, therefore the MT brand will not be used on the bottle. Wiley Roots believes that brewing beer in the Belgian tradition should also extend to pricing, so the brewery will keep their spontaneous program pricing in line with their other mixed-culture offerings.

Online reservations for Bing Cherry Spontaneous will start on October 1, 2018. Bing Cherry Spontaneous was brewed in the fall of 2016 with Our Mutual Friend Brewery. It was then fermented and aged for over 12 months in neutral oak barrels, before being transferred onto Colorado-grown Bing cherries at a rate of 2 lbs per gallon. The beer was allowed to referment on Bing cherries until the desired dryness and flavor profile were achieved. Bing Cherry Spontaneous was bottled in March of 2018, refermented in the bottle, and then allowed to condition for an additional 8 months before its public release.

Bing Cherry Spontaneous is a single barrel release and is the first spontaneously fermented beer released in Greeley, Colorado. Online reservations of Bing Cherry Spontaneous will be available through Brown Paper Tickets on October 1, 2018 at 10:00 AM MST. Reservations will cost $18 per 500mL bottle with a strict limit of one reservation per person with a total of 250 allocations available. No proxies will be allowed for this release, but reserved bottles can be picked up from the Wiley Roots taproom through October 28, 2018. Additional details for the release can be found at: wileyroots.com/bing-cherry-spontaneous.