On Saturday, October 28th, Pen Druid is holding its annual End of Oktoberfest festival. With a pig roast, fermented foods, and all sorts of local fare it's a fantastic excuse to get out to Sperryville, Virginia, a beat that DCBeer rarely covers. Beyond the delicious food and fantastically authentic antiques, of note is Pen Druid's first batch of spontaneously fermented beer. Greg Engert, Drew Kelley, and Nathan Zeender all told you to watch out for them at the close of 2016. Now go, and try the breweries best attempts to pay homage to Lambic. Pen Druid's Van Carney said: We are super super super excited because we will be releasing our first batch of spontaneously fermented beer!! It was brewed in the traditional method, 65% local malt, 35% local raw wheat and 100% aged hops from our (Rappahannock) county. It was turbid mashed, cool shipped and let to sit for 16 months in freshly dumped local (Linden Vineyards) red wine barrels. Two of the barrels from the batch were blended together and then packaged with priming sugar to referment in the bottle and the keg. Also we DO NOT inoculate our barrels with anything beforehand…….. Since we have only brewed two seasons worth of spontaneous, we won't be able to blend 3 different years to achieve unprimed carbonation until next year. We will also have a blackberry sour, Ida, conditioned on 125 lbs of local organic blackberries from Sunnyside Farm and a wild wineberry sour, The Critter, that was conditioned on 60 lbs of wild foraged wineberries we picked locally."
So there you have it. Go forth and beer!
Also, for those of you city mice who've never made it out to Sperryville, now is your chance to try Hopkins Ordinary Aleworks, a bed and breakfast with a nano brewery on site. Cheers to Rappahannock beers!
