WHAT ALES ME

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 @GINOFANELLI GFANELLI@ROCHESTER-CITYNEWS.COM

On 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.”

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

earthiness in a wild ale. If done wrong, the beer can literally taste like shit.

Wild ales are challenging to make because they take months to produce and the result is never guaranteed. Thus, despite the beer world’s fervor for Belgian wild ales like Cantillion, a quarter-century on from La Folie’s introduction, you’re unlikely to find many small breweries investing time in wild ales.

But some do.

Located on the Erie Canal in Pittsford, Copper Leaf Brewing opened in April with a surprising three wild ales on tap, one with peach, another with blackberries, and a third with strawberries. The cozy taproom is adorned with barrels set up between tables, each with a water-filled stopper sticking out from the barrel, bubbling away as the bugs do their work. Co-owner Clay Killian said he developed a passion for wild ales through cooking.

“All of this came from my love for creating flavors and cooking,” Killian said. “Brewing is really sort of like cooking with science. I look at it as a lot of chemistry and science and equations and different factors involved, but at the end of the day, you’re cooking beer.”

In recent years, an explosion in sour ales, typically those laced with heavy doses of fruit, has swept the craft beer market. These beers, dubbed kettle sours, or informally “quick sours,” are beers inoculated with Lactobacillus.

While wild ales are a variety of sour ales, not all sour ales are wild ales. The distinction is important because you’ll find sour beers at most any brewery nowadays, including Strangebird and Copper Leaf. They’re cheaper and easier to produce than wild ales, but are not as layered or nuanced. In the current beer landscape, a quick sour typically works as a vehicle for whatever fruit flavors are added.

Out on Seneca Lake, Jesse Perlmutter of Pantomime Mixtures has carved out a niche for himself by focusing exclusively on wild beers. He is planning on expanding that idea by branching off into wild fermented wines, dubbed “natural wine,” and ciders in coming months.

Perlmutter said kettle sours are the fast food of sour ales. They’re quick, easy, and can be satisfying, but are an

Eric Salazar takes a sample of a wild Belgian golden ale from a barrel. PHOTO BY GINO FANELLI

unsophisticated version of the sour style. Wild ales, on the other hand, are perhaps the most complex. If a kettle sour were a McRib, a wild ale is a slow-smoked rack from Dinosaur Bar-B-Que.

“I feel like it’s really the way Americans take technology and take a beverage idea and make it (faster and easier),” Perlmutter said of kettle sours. Salazar, Perlmutter, and Killian all agree that wild ales won’t be the next big thing in craft beer. They won’t replace IPAs or kettle sours. They’re too complex to brew, and their nuance and foreign flavors can turn off casual American drinkers.

Yet across the country, and right here in Rochester, more breweries are dabbling in these long-fermented, hardto-brew beers steeped in centuries of traditions.

If you see a beer on a tap list with a description filled with more bacteria than hops, consider taking a walk on the wild side.

The taproom floor of Copper Leaf is filled with barrels full of fermenting beer.

PHOTO BY GINO FANELLI

DRINK THIS NOW:

Salus by Strangebird Brewing Company 62 Marshall St., Rochester

A gateway of deceptively bright, acidic notes gives way to a torrent of dark, earthy flavors laced with subtle notes of roast and woodiness, before finishing with a crisp, herbal bite.

Barrel-Aged American Wild Ale with Peaches by Copper Leaf Brewing 50 State St., Building G, Pittsford

Tart peach notes play off a backbone of a sour base, melding perfectly at the finish with just a kiss of vinegar and a subdued sweetness. A little extra vinegar and some oil and you’ll have yourself a real nice salad dressing as well.

Anejo by Pantomime Mixtures 3839 Ball Diamond Road, Hector

Okay, I haven’t tried this beer yet, but as of this writing, it is being shipped out to my house. What has me eager to sip this brew is Pantomime’s beers often carry a remarkably bright complexity that is a perfect match for an addition of agave and some time in a Tequila barrel.

Baard Tovenaar by Three Heads Brewing 186 Atlantic Ave., Rochester

While not a best seller for Three Heads, this Flanders red ale stands out to me as among the most impressive beers the NOTA staple has ever produced. Expect rich red wine notes laced with touches of honey, tart cherry, and dried fruit.

LIFE WAFFLEPALOOZA

House of Whacks says of its Cracked Cake, “Imagine that pudding and cheesecake had a baby.” PHOTO BY REBECCA RAFFERTY

SNACK ATTACKS AT HOUSE OF WHACKS

BY CHRIS THOMPSON @CHRONSOFNON & REBECCA RAFFERTY @RSRAFFERTY BECCA@ROCHESTER-CITYNEWS.COM

HOUSE OF WHACKS

250 ANDREWS STREET MONDAY THROUGH FRIDAY, 8 A.M. TO 4 P.M. 360-4800; HOUSEOFWHACKS.SQUARE.SITE

The Cracked Cake looked like an ordinary lemon square covered in powdered sugar, but the chef promised it was more.

“Imagine that pudding and cheesecake had a baby,” was how Es Davy described her signature dessert at House of Whacks, a new restaurant in the St. Paul Quarter that specializes in comfort foods both savory and sweet.

“That baby ascended to heaven for three days and was touched by God,” Es D, as she prefers to be called, went on. “It came back to Earth to become Cracked Cake, to bless everyone with its presence.”

Without having witnessed the ascension, I can’t vouch for her claims of otherworldliness. But it tasted divine.

House of Whacks, which opened in the flatiron building at the corner of Andrews and Bittner streets in April, will be known for its waffle dishes, but its menu is a study in contrasts. Waffle creations are prominent, but there are also Caribbean-inspired oxtail or pot roast lunch plates, fruit smoothies brimming with color and flavor, and rich and gooey, hit-the-spot mac ‘n’ cheese.

All of it is prepared and presented for diners on the go, but the cheerful decor beckons one to sit and stay a while. Flooded with natural light from windows on both sides of the building’s wedged storefront, House of Whacks has abundant seating in bold primary colors reminiscent of a playground or an ice cream parlor. The logo on the door — a red, green, blue, and yellow abstract grid of a waffle — complements the lighthearted atmosphere.

When it opened, the place seemed an instant hit, enjoying a flurry of foot traffic for days. On its first Friday in business, the restaurant had sold out of everything on the menu but waffles and milkshakes. Two months in, the lunch rush remains

Gummy worms are a garnish on the Dirt Waffle. PHOTO BY JACOB WALSH

Wafflewich with bacon, cheese, lettuce, and tomato. PHOTO BY JACOB WALSH quite brisk, particularly on Fridays.

The restaurant is the creation of Es and Dae Davy, who honed their culinary skills by preparing food for family and friends. They catered special events, such as baby showers and christenings and birthday parties. As word spread about their fare, the customer base grew from family and friends, to friends of family and friends.

Eventually, the Davys expanded their catering service under the zany name “Whacky Waffles House of Whacks.” They had planned on popping-up at the festival circuit last year, but the pandemic derailed that idea.

“We weren’t planning on opening a restaurant at first,” Dae said. “We had just applied to all the festivals for the spring and summer, but then COVID hit.”

When the storefront at Andrews and Bittner went on the market, the Davys saw an opportunity. The place had recently housed a café and didn’t need much renovation. A few splashes of color later, and a slight modification to the name of their business, and the Davys had “House of Whacks.”

On the day I visited, the corner was bathed in a blend of aromas of waffle batter and cinnamon, courtesy of the homemade honey-cinnamon butter that tops the waffles. The scent intensified inside and had an unexpected relaxing effect on me.

I ordered the Chicken and Waffles ($12) — two crispy and juicy chicken breasts that span the diameter of the waffle, served with syrup and that honeycinnamon butter. Melting the butter between the chicken and the waffles is the best way to take in the combination of the savory breasts and the sweet squares of syrup-soaked waffles.

Another staple of the menu is the breakfast-friendly Wafflewich ($10). It is a waffle split in half and stuffed with two eggs, cheese, lettuce, tomato, onion, and a choice of bacon, sausage, or turkey sausage. The sandwich is a small mountain that requires a large container, even for the leftovers.

Big eaters might be tempted by the House of Whacks meal that comes with a main dish, a drink, and a dessert for $15. I tried the steamed fish with rice, a dish inspired by Dae’s Jamaican upbringing. It was a snapper filet saturated in the semisweet flavors of peppers, okra, and a house spice blend. A piece of sweet corn bread and a side garden salad rounded out the meal.

For dessert, I sampled three options: the Banana Nut Pudding, the Strawberry Milkshake Cake, and, of course, the heavenly Cracked Cake. All three are Es D’s own creations.

The pudding is chock full of fresh-cut bananas and vanilla wafers drizzled with caramel. The Strawberry Milkshake Cake is a lot like a strawberry shortcake; a light vanilla cake base is topped with fresh strawberries and a whipped topping that Es D makes each morning. Then there was the pudding and cheesecake’s celestial baby.

Eighteen-months ago, Es D and Dae had their own baby — a little girl. So, for now, they’re running the business with the help of family members when possible and currently closing on weekends to be with their daughter. That still leaves you a window of eight hours a day, five days a week to satisfy your sweet or savory craving.