Interlude started as an accident.
The barrel-aged beer from Maine’s Allagash Brewing Co. contains a strain of yeast that the brewery discovered a decade ago in a beer it didn’t belong in. Rogue yeast is a bad thing in brewing, and it caused that particular batch to spoil, so the brewers dumped it.
What the Allagash brewers found out is that the uninvited yeast, once isolated, was a particular strain of Brettanomyces, and can actually make some pretty great beer. It works slowly, giving off tropical fruit character as it chews through the beer. Some strains of Brettanomyces are known for the funky, barnyard notes they impart into a brew. In this Allagash beer those notes are present but overshadowed by passion fruit and pineapple, according to brewmaster Jason Perkins.
This will be the 10th year Allagash has brewed Interlude, all under Perkins’s guidance. The Bates College graduate briefly left Maine for other brewing jobs, before returning to Portland to work at Allagash. His arrival coincides with a serious effort by Allagash to dive into a barrel-aging program relying heavily on this and other wild yeasts. “We do a wide range, some traditional fermentation and some wild, sour beers,” says Perkins. “Interlude almost falls in between.”
Interlude is fermented twice, first with the brewery’s traditional Belgian yeast strain and then with Brettanomyces. The beer takes 8 or 9 months to brew because the second strain works slowly. Right before packaging, Perkins and his team blend in a fermentation of oak-aged beer, which makes up about 15 percent of the final product. The barrel portion is a full batch older than the rest of the beer, meaning that 2014 Interlude is partially composed of beer barrel-aged in 2013.
“We’ve been kind of fooling around with wild fermentations for 11 or 12 years now,” says Perkins. “It was really small scale in the early years. It kind of was always part of our DNA to be experimenting and innovating. For us it’s been a logical extension of what we were doing.”
My bottle of Interlude appears orange in the glass. It smells sour; lemon, horse blanket, and pineapple blend into an intimidating aroma. The beer is less menacing in the mouth. It’s a little sour but mostly fruity, a little funky but not enough to remind you of wet socks. This is a big beer (9.5 percent alcohol by volume), but you shouldn’t be afraid to walk up and shake its hand.