Our 2021 Royal Qld Food & Wine Show Beer Awards Results

Some of our first AWOL barrel aged beers were brewed with wild yeast. But these are from yeast suppliers who have cultured strains whose characteristics and flavors are known and can be replicated. This is how most wild yeast brews are made.

The yeast we capture in the Tarle Valley is our own unique strain. If your yeast provides you with an amazing beer, you can grow it royal under lab conditions and use it again to brew more of the same beer.
In the Australian craft beer scene,

 there are several breweries that specialize in wild fermented beers and are known for their methods of brewing and blending wild fermented beers. These include Wildflower Brewing and Blending in New South Wales, 

Van Diemen’s Brewing in Tasmania royal and La Cirene Brewing in Melbourne. 

It’s an exciting space and we’re eager to experiment more and more here as time goes on.

We’re currently putting the finishing touches royal on our AWOL barrel-aged beer program, and we plan to open Stowaway Peak for a private tour in early April before the official launch. We will be offering 8 barrels of aged beer, some in limited supply and some in cans. Our wild fermented beers are not yet ready.

We attached a hose to the open fermenter and sent the beer downstream to a container that would be filled by gravity for transport. We ended up with 120 liters of Tahlequah beer. 

On the same day, Toshi brewed 200 liters of beer at headquarters, and we mixed the two batches together in the fermenter at headquarters. This gave us 300L, which was the perfect amount to fill a 300L white wine barrel after the fermentation process.

Throughout the fermentation process, we regularly tested the beer for the presence of any beer-damaging microorganisms, and checked for alcohol production and pH changes. The monitoring process is also very sensory – we smell it and watch it regularly.

The beer is now in AWOL white wine barrels, which will be infused with more barrel-aged flavors, and we are taking advantage of the new AWOL program. The whole process takes about nine months before the beer is ready to drink.
This truly experimental brew is the opposite of how we usually brew beer in a tightly controlled environment, where nothing is possible. This wild beer is our little experimental beer baby, and while we can’t make a definitive decision yet, so far it seems the beer gods may be smiling down on us.