It’s always fun to see examples of craft beer-related stories popping up in less-than-traditional mainstream media outlets. The most recent example of this was a story which appeared this month in The Atlantic Monthly of all places (or at least their website; I’m not sure if it made the print edition of the magazine or not) on Maine’s favorite boundaries-pushing brewery Allagash. The article, which describes Allagash as “The future of American craft brewing”, details their recent use of a “koelschip” and the incredible, intricate beers its producing. Says The Atlantic,
The future of American craft beer sits in a shed on the industrial outskirts of Portland, Maine. Built by the Allagash Brewing Company in 2007, the shed holds the country’s first commercial “koelschip,” a shallow, 15-barrel steel pan used to cool down beer wort–and expose the beer to naturally occurring yeasts that float in through the shed’s open stained-glass windows. The results, which are still aging in the brewery’s warehouse and could be ready for drinking early next year, will be the first American lambic produced according to the traditional methods used in Belgium, where wild-yeast fermentation is considered a national treasure.
Congratulations, of course, to Allagash for their continued varied and hugely successful media coverage and I for one cannot wait to taste what comes out of the koelschip first! Read the rest of the Atlantic piece here.
