LIFE
WHAT ALES ME
Eric Salazar, the director of wood-aged beers at Strangebird Brewing, pours a a glass of Salus. PHOTO BY GINO FANELLI
ROCHESTER BREWERIES WALK ON THE WILD SIDE WITH WILD ALES BY GINO FANELLI
O
@GINOFANELLI
n a sunny morning recently, Eric Salazar, the director of wood-aged beers at Strangebird Brewing on Marshall Street in Rochester, poured a glass of Salus, the brewery’s wild dark saison. Upon a first sip, the off-brown brew is tart, then shifts to darker notes of woodiness and funk before ending with an herbal, tonic water-esque finish. “The challenge of my career has always been balance,” Salazar said. “It’s to let all parts of the beer live and breathe and have a place in the profile, and not be overtaken by whatever fruit you’ve added, whatever bacteria you’ve added.” 64 CITY JUNE 2021
GFANELLI@ROCHESTER-CITYNEWS.COM
Salus is the first wild ale offering from Strangebird, but far from the first for Salazar. In fact, Salazar is credited with bringing wild beers to the United States. In 1996 while working at New Belgium Brewing in Fort Collins, Colorado, Salazar, alongside his former wife Lauren Limbach and brewmaster Peter Bouckaert, produced La Folie, a sour ale that is widely considered the first commercial wild ale made in America. Aged in French oak foeder vessels and brimming with nuanced notes of tart cherry, dark chocolate, and nondescript funk, the beer would be
standard fare in a place like the Flanders region of Belgium, where wild ales have their origins in beers like lambics, framboises, saisons, and Flanders red ales. Coincidentally, Bouckaert had trained at the heralded Flemish brewery Rodenbach. But La Folie was unlike anything American beer drinkers had ever tasted. “For me, it was the challenge,” Salazar said of brewing wood-aged wild ales. “You’re producing a beer that you don’t know right away whether it’s good or not. You’ve spent all of the time, heart, and soul in making the beer, and you have no idea what the end result will be.”
For the uninitiated, a wild ale is a beer brewed using wild yeast, as opposed to commercial brewer’s yeast, and assorted bacterias, and is typically aged in wood barrels for a long period of time. While most beer is aged over a matter of weeks, wild ales spend months, sometimes more than a year, in the barrel. The “bugs,” as Salazar calls the bacteria, mix and mingle, adding nuanced layers of flavor and personality. Bacterias like Lactobacillus add sourness, while the yeast Brettanomyces evokes spiciness reminiscent of a farmhouse. If done right, the latter can bring out an
