Frigus
Here is where OEC goes truly rustic and out there. “Frigus is our project where barrels are aged in our small outdoor barn,” said Neidhart. “The barn is neither heated nor cooled, and in the winter it drops well below freezing—exposing the beer to the natural fluctuations of the climate.” One of the first beers released from the barn was Vetus, which came out just as funky, sour, and vinous as you could expect from having spent a year freezing and thawing naturally in South African red wine barrels. (Above, pictured, is the wheat wine "Imperium," another product of the Frigus project.)
Hydromelita
Everything in the Hydromelita collection integrates honey wine in some way, and these products are often called "braggots."
“A true braggot is a blend of two finished products—a mead and a beer,” said Neidhart. “Our braggot incorporates a finished OEC beer and a finished mead from one of our imported partners.”
Grandis Hydromelita is one such terrific blend of OEC ales (matured in barrels for up to three years) and a South African gem, Makana’s iQhilika Coffee Mead.
The result is as complex as it sounds: rich, roast-y, and sweetly sour.
Spontalis
“Shocking as it may seem, we love traditional lambic ales from Belgium,” says Neidhart. “Spontalis is our homage to those spontaneously fermented beers.” These brews sit in a custom-built coolship (a wide, shallow, flat copper, open-fermentation vessel) for 16 hours, catching airborne yeast that starts the fermentation process. Then they mature in oak barrels in the re-popularized lambic style. On its own, Spontalis can be ruthlessly tart, thanks to its wild genesis, though it is also used as a blending component in some of OEC’s other enterprises, as with recent batches of Tempus.
Urwaga
Based on a Kenyan method of brewing, “Urwaga is our project where barrels are selected to age in our underground fermentation pit,” said Neidhart. This is the least-explored project of OEC’s, as just one Urwaga experiment has seen release. It was a Roja barrel that was filled with Aecht Schlenkerla Rauchbier Weizen (a classic smoked wheat-beer from Bamberg, Germany), matured underground for more than a year.
Zymatore
There is nothing else quite like the Zymatore premise, in which OEC doesn't brew at all. Rather, it takes base beers from other breweries in the B.United portfolio and ages them in barrels that have previously stored other wine and/or liquor. “All this is done with the original producers’ consent,” said Neidhart. “No two Zymatore will ever taste the same, and we do not intend for Zymatore to taste like their base product.” Case in point: the reliably clean, crisp, traditional German Reissdorf Kölsch spent time in Pazzo barrels (a fortified Madeira wine) for the Zymatore project and came out with more yeast-forward sour woody notes—a genre unto itself.
This story was provided by Bloomberg News.