It all started five years ago, when Firestone Walker Brewing Company moved its wild-ale program from the main brewery in Paso Robles to a new location in Buellton. Headed by resident Master Blender Jim Crooks, the 14,000 square-foot warehouse attached to two tasting rooms along with a full-service brew pub at 620 McMurray Road off Highway 101, has transformed into a veritable cathedral of beer-filled barrels.
“It seems like just yesterday that we made this big bet on what had long been a pet project,” Jeffers Richardson, director of Barrelworks, said in a statement. “In the five years since opening Barrelworks, we’ve really grown into our home and taken our wild ale machinations to an entirely new level.”
Crooks told the Sun that out of the 300,000 barrels produced by Firestone annually, Barrelworks accounts for maybe 1 percent of the business’ total volume. It’s a fact he said that serves as a testament to the Central Coast company’s devotion to producing old-world style beers that cut against the grain in terms of North American craft brewing.
“It’s amazing that a company that’s been as prolific as ours has embraced this wild and crazy and obscure and feral idea of really appreciating these Belgian beers as much as we have,” Crooks added.
To put it simply, Barrelworks has “bought in” to the weird: producing varieties of sour beers, hybrid ales, and other bold blends of fresh fruit and wort—liquid extracted from the “mashing” process of brewing—that has become the domestic de facto symbol for traditional Belgian, Lambic beers.
The name “Lambic” comes from a town near a small region in Belgium called “Lembeek,” and the style involves wild yeast and bacteria fermenting beer in open vats, which are later stored in barrels and aged for years. The product typically runs sour but is often fermented with fruits to limit tartness.
For example, Barrelworks has a Bretta Rosé, which uses mostly local, Santa Maria raspberries as a key part of its fermenting process.
“It’s just got this amazing pink rosé hue and the aroma of freshly picked raspberries,” Crooks said, who added that the different fruit utilized by blenders set different beers apart the same way different varieties of hops would.
While outsiders tend to refer to Firestone’s master blender as some sort of mad scientist toiling away in a laboratory, in person, the brains behind Barrelworks resembles more artist than whitecoat when speaking about his craft.
On blending, he said: “I think the real magic of blending is it’s like you’re painting—every time you look at a good painting there’s some new aspect or detail you didn’t notice the first time you looked at it. It’s about taking your nuances—your color palette—and you start taking those colors and layering them on your canvas, with the canvas being your base, until you feel like you’ve got a beer there that keeps people’s perception guessing.”
According to Crooks, blenders look at alcohol content, color, aroma, bitterness, and acidity before pushing forward with an idea.
“Blending is about what you do to go about using those [criteria] as a guideline but not letting those things dictate your blend so much,” he said. “It’s about blending yourself the best beer for your palate.
“It’s about bringing detail into what can be a very one-dimensional product,” he added.
Another key component is understanding the diversity of your cellar, which Barrelworks especially keeps in mind while making its annual Feral One Batch. Crooks and his top assistant, Beau Sorenson, go through hundreds of barrels looking for flavors that remind them of traditional gueuze beers they’ve drunk in Belgium.
“[Feral One] is what we feel is our best tasting barrels throughout the year, blended together, out of all our different barrels, and all our different batches of beer, and all the different flavors that we create in barrels and then age,” Crooks explained. “It’s probably become one of the harder beers to make because to find those barrels, you have to dig through your cellar.
“We don’t brew Feral One. We don’t brew to order—that’s a beer that’s created by the magic of the barrel, of the cellar. That’s something that the bacteria and the yeast create for us, and as a blender, I’m just there to find those barrels and mark them and have the tenacity and patience to hold on to them and not blend them, and hold them so we can make Feral One.”
Staff Writer Spencer Cole wrote this week’s Biz Spotlight. Information should be sent to the Sun via fax, mail, or email at spotlight@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Mar 1-8, 2018.
