Anheuser Busch Companies (BUD)

[FUNMAN]

'The holy grail': Wicked Weed expands into other states, shows off pet projects at home

Mackensy Lunsford, Asheville Citizen Times Published 5:00 a.m. ET Oct. 10, 2019

https://www.citizen-times.com/story/news/local/2019/10/10/wicked-weed-brewing-expand-new-states-cultura-funkatorium/759750002/

ASHEVILLE - When Wicked Weed finalized its sale to Anheuser-Busch InBev about two years ago, the backlash was swift. But co-founder Walt Dickinson maintained from the start that the sale wouldn't impact the brewery's creativity.

“As a brewer, giving our team more resources to continue innovating our portfolio and the ability to reach more craft drinkers, allows us to keep putting the beer and the people first," he said in the 2017 announcement that rocked the beer world.

A year after the sale, Wicked Weed head blender Andrew Zinn said creativity was still alive and well at the brewery. "That's gone nowhere."

Zinn was standing next to Wicked Weed's coolship, used to make a line of lambic-style beer fermented with ambient yeast, at the brewery's Arden headquarters.

This weekend, the first of that beer will be available for the public to taste.

Since joining A-B InBev, the brewery has also aggressively fulfilled its promise to reach more drinkers. Though the exact terms of the sale are unknown, Wicked Weed received at least $18 million of capital expenditure funding alone.

That money went to building infrastructure, like a new canning line, to help meet growing demand for flagship beers like Pernicious and Astronomical IPAs and Freak of Nature Double IPA.

Wicked Weed, which opened with 65 employees, also built new offices for its staff, which has grown 52% since the acquisition. The brewery now employs 340 people, 315 of them in the Asheville area. About 70% of the non-pub employees on board during the time of the acquisition remain.

The brewery this year opened its first fine-dining restaurant, Cultura, next to a greatly expanded Funkatorium, which now has an event space and beer garden. Expansion also came to Wicked Weed's Candler brewing facility, which has seen the addition of a state-of-the-art laboratory and a public taproom, which opened this summer.

A new airport bar, stadium kiosks

Even more projects are in the works, including a bar in the E Concourse in the Charlotte Douglas International Airport, slated to open in November, as well as some stadium kiosks in Atlanta.

"And we're going to keep making more retail experiences where our cool side projects will show up," Dickinson said. "We like making things that are delicious and get people drunk," he joked.

To that end, the Wicked Weed team will this weekend roll out Cultura 2019, the spontaneously fermented line of beer that bears the same name as the brewery's restaurant.

It represents what Dickinson calls "The holy grail of mixed culture fermentation."

"The idea of capturing the native yeast of an area to give a sense of the flora and terroir, that was to me the pinnacle of mixed-culture beers," he said. "And the restaurant represents the pinnacle of what we can do in the food space."

The brewery has packaged about 75 barrels of the Cultura line so far, "which for us is a good bit," Dickinson said. The hope is that Cultura, the restaurant, will always have Cultura, the beer, on hand. "Because for me, this is the future of our sour program."

Coolship, natural yeasts

The Cultura line is a faithful recreation of centuries-old Belgian lambic tradition. "We followed the letter of the law," Dickinson said.

In simplified terms, that means brewing with aged hops and malt from Riverbend Malt House customized to reflect what Belgian brewers use. Brewers then move the resultant wort into coolships, which look like enormous baking pans. The larger surface area allows the wort to cool naturally, and also lets natural yeasts and bacteria settle on the surface.

At Wicked Weed's Arden facility, the coolship is in a room paneled with unfinished ambrosia maple. Louvered, glassless windows invite in the bacterial composition of the Arden air. The coolship is only filled in winter, when the air isn't quite as thick with bacteria — or bugs.

"It needs to be in that freezing zone," said Dickinson. "When it gets to the low 30s at night, I say, 'Guys it's time to start making spontaneous beer.'"

To influence the yeasts and bacteria that settle into the beer, the brewery has planted about 150 apple fruit trees on its 18 acres of Arden land, mostly English and French cider apples, like the bittersweet Amere de Berthcourt, a prototypical Normandy cider apple.

There are even red-fleshed apples native to Kyrgyzstan, which can also be used to make cider with a light pink hue and an old world funk. Though juice from those apples may show up in pet projects like farmhouse cider, the real project is influencing the property's bacterial terroir.

"We want to encourage as many wild yeasts as possible," Zinn said last year. "Flowers, bees, fruit, all of those are excellent means of building that wild yeast and bacteria into your environment."

Once cooled and naturally inoculated, the beer rests in oak barrels for further fermentation and aging. The 2019 Cultura line is composed of three different blends of one-, two- and three-year barrel-aged lambic-style beer.

A portion of each blend was hand-bottled as-is, but some was re-fermented with either local blackberries, peaches or local red muscadine grapes, resulting in six distinctly different brews.