The grain and the grape

Have you heard of fonio? If you haven't yet, you will, at least according to Brooklyn Brewery's Garrett Oliver who has become an advocate for this climate-resistant African grain. Its most important attribute is that you can make beer from it, which will be terribly useful once the Earth decides it can't do barley any more. Garrett had come to St James's Gate to make a fonio-based collaboration beer, although that won't be out until much later this year. He also brought over some beers of his own to share.

Showcasing fonio at Brooklyn is Fonio Rising, a pilsner, but a monstrously strong one, at 6.4% ABV. The aroma is fairly true to style, with lots of grass and only a little more of a grain quality than usual. The flavour does show that something odd is happening, however: fonio is not a neutral barley substitute, it has a character all its own. That manifested as a kind of spicy fruit, like fruitcake, where raisin and cherry mix with cinnamon and ginger. The pilsner crispness is maintained, but it's otherwise a very long way from the precise tenets of the style, even a strong one. Nevertheless, I liked it. And if it's saving the planet, then all the better.

The next one doesn't involve fonio and is a novelty beer with a lovely backstory. It's called MegaPurple after one of its ingredients: a grape concentrate which is heavily used at the cheaper end of the American wine industry, ensuring that the lowest grade of product does actually look and taste like wine. No producer would ever admit to using it, and its very existence is something of a trade secret. Brooklyn is trolling the substance's creator and its customers by making it a headline feature.

The beer certainly smells like a grape ale: slightly sharp, with rich notes of blackcurrant. There's a substantial wild component to it, involving a yeast culture supplied by Russian River and blending with a lambic-a-like before ageing in wine barrels. The result has big, tannic, red wine notes and a lot of funky farmyard Brettanomyces character. There's a fully-admitted trolling of the natural wine movement as well, in the extent to which it has borrowed their flavour profile. I thought it was excellent and very much in the style and quality of grape ale that the best of Italy make. I was never a big fan of Russian River's wild efforts, but it's been a few years, and maybe cutting them with syrupy grape gunk was what they needed all along.

A big thanks to the Guinness folk for organising the event, and Garrett for bringing the beers. I look forward to seeing how they got on brewing with fonio in Dublin.