Touch of Brett: Citra

Touch of Brett is, for us, the embodiment of brewing the beer you like to drink! What makes our Touch of Brett series special is our house culture of Brettanomyces yeast that begs you to take another sip.

These beers gain so much complexity while aging because of the yeast. Whereas most beers ferment in just a couple of weeks with typical brewer’s yeast (Saccharomyces), Brett ferments beer incredibly slowly, and with that comes complex flavors and aromas that are hard to find anywhere else in the culinary world. 

These yeast-derived flavors complement the natural qualities of malt and hops incredibly well. Brettanomyces ferments deliver some light fruity notes that help blend the yeast and hop aromas together. They also create some herbal, hay-like notes, spicy qualities like coriander, and sometimes “funky” flavors that compliment the malt character. 

With that said, Brett can also be very unpredictable, sometimes causing barrels treated exactly the same way to taste dramatically different. And that’s when we go from brewers to blenders. We taste through every barrel to find the ones with fruity qualities and spicy qualities and other flavors we think will meld into the perfect beer. Knowing we won’t be adding fruits or spices to this blend, we’re particular about not letting one barrel overpower any other — while blending, we’re striving for balance

And to top it off, we get to custom pick the hop whose flavors will help accentuate some of the already-present characteristics in our beer. So for this iteration of Touch of Brett, we picked Citra hops, known for adding notes of oranges, passionfruit and grapefruit, but also soft notes like lychee and cumquat.

This year’s blend is also exciting for us because Citra is actually the hop we used in our first (and GABF-gold-medal-winning) rendition of Touch of Brett. We’ve come a long way since then and with four years and two more GABF medals for Touch of Brett under our belt, it’s nice to return to the blend that basically started it all.

We hope you enjoy this beer as much as we do. Cheers!