Following the release of Atrial Rubicite, we are pleased to announce our second barrel-aged sour beer refermented with fruit — Omniscience & Proselytism. Back in April, we added fresh strawberries from Fredicksburg, Texas to mature, sour beer in our barrel room. The fruit then refermented to dryness in oak barrels over the course of the following months. Omniscience & Proselytism is our first beer made using exclusively Texas fruit.
Combining fruit and beer has become somewhat of a common practice among modern brewers, but the way this is most often done involves adding fruit, juice, concentrate, or even artificial fruit flavors to filtered or pasteurized beer. As a result, the fruit flavors in the beer remain static and do not have the potential to exceed the sum of their parts. Refermentation with fruit is a different process. The fruit is put in contact with living microorganisms in the beer that break down sugars and create new flavor and aroma compounds. This is why wine doesn’t taste like grape juice. The fruit flavors are transformed through fermentation and have the potential to become unique, complex and quite delicious.
When we referment mature, sour beer with fruit, our end goal is to produce a very dry beer that is unique to the microflora in our barrel room. We introduce the fruit to a diverse combination of organisms — namely Farmhouse yeast, Brettanomyces yeast, souring bacteria, and wild yeast native to our land in the Texas Hill Country. The microorganisms consume the sugars from the fruit to create new flavors and aromas. The result is a flavor profile with a sense of place unique to our brewery in the Hill Country.
Omniscience & Proselytism is 5.0% alcohol by volume, with a finishing gravity of 1.006 and a pH of 3.4. It is unfiltered, unpasteurized and 100% bottle conditioned. Because we were only able to source a few hundred pounds of strawberries this year, less than five hundred 500ml bottles of Omniscience & Proselytism exist. It will be released at Jester King at our 3rd Annual Funk & Sour Fest on Sunday, October 27th, during Austin Beer Week. We’ll be posting ticket information and more details in the coming weeks. Next year we’ll try to find more Texas strawberries so that we can make a larger batch.
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