Fruit Guide

Most breweries make a fruit beer at some point. Here it is the whole company, and it has been since the doors opened, which over enough years produced an awkward problem. There was no word for the specific thing we were doing, so we had to write one down. This page is that word, the scale underneath it, and the rest of what we make arranged around both.

The scale

Every brewery that puts fruit in a beer will tell you it uses a lot of fruit. Very few of them will say how much, which is fair enough, because until recently nobody was obliged to.

A Fruit Tart is a beer built so that the fruit is the subject rather than an ingredient. The adjective in front of the name tells you the density, measured in pounds of fruit per gallon of finished beer.

• Fruit Tart — under one pound per gallon
• American Fruit Tart — one to two pounds per gallon
• Midwest Fruit Tart — more than two pounds per gallon

The bottom of that range is already more fruit than most beers will see in their lifetime. The top of it, better than two pounds a gallon, works out to something north of three ounces of fruit in a twelve ounce can, which is an unreasonable thing to ask of a brewhouse and the only route we have found to the flavor we are after.

Gadget sits at the Midwest end of the scale and Teak at the American end. Either one will explain the number faster than this page can.

Why fruit

The honest answer is that we liked it and we wanted to be good at one specific thing. Craft beer at the time had a great many people making the same handful of styles extremely well, and fruit was open ground, which is a polite way of saying that almost nobody else wanted it. So we took the part nobody was working on.

It turned out to suit us. What the work actually asks for is patience, an unreasonable quantity of fruit, and a willingness to be the brewery that will argue about apricot varieties for the better part of an hour.

What makes a Fruit Tart

A fruited gose is a gose that has had fruit added to it, and a fruited sour is a sour under the same arrangement. The base style gets decided first, and the fruit arrives afterward as a guest.

A Fruit Tart is assembled in the other direction. The malt bill and the yeast are chosen for their willingness to step aside, and then, having stepped aside, to push the fruit further out in front. Nothing in the recipe is there on its own account. If a grain or a strain does not make the fruit taste more like itself, it does not go in, no matter how well it has behaved in some other beer.

That is the whole of the difference, and it is why the words we already had would not do the job.

Brut Fruit Tart

Retired, and missed. For several years we built Fruit Tarts on wine grape varietals, which produced some of the best beer this brewery has ever made and taught us a great deal about how far a base can be stripped back before it stops holding anything up.

Brut stays on the scale on purpose. The scale describes how we think about making beer, and that outlasts whatever happens to be in the cooler this month.

Seedless

Seedless is a Fruit Tart with the alcohol left out, built on the same fruit and the same argument about density, with nothing to drive home from.

It drinks closer to a fruit soda than to a beer, which is where we were aiming. Non-alcoholic beer usually spends its energy on an impression of beer, and if one has let you down before, the impression is probably where it happened. Seedless spends its energy somewhere else entirely.

Capy Snacks

Fruit forward and openly sweet, where the Tarts go tart. Capy Snacks is its own line with its own idea about what fruit in a beer ought to feel like, and it is not competing on density with anything above it on this page.

Cincinnati Black Raspberry is the one most people meet first, usually at somebody else’s suggestion and usually without meaning to. If the tart end of the range has never been for you, this is the door in.

The Dino Series

Traditional beer styles with real fruit in them, which is a different job entirely. Stego is a Golden Ale, Spino an IPA, Dunk a paw paw Dunkel, and Missing Link a prickly pear Mexican Lager.

In the Dino Series the base style leads and the fruit works in support of it, which is the correct way to describe a fruited beer and the reason these sit apart from the rest of the catalogue. We are careful about the distinction, having spent a long time earning the other one.

The names are getting shorter as we go, to Stego and Spino and Ally, because nobody has ever successfully ordered a Pachycephalosaurus across a loud bar and we have stopped asking anyone to try.

How to read a release

Core. Year round, always in the cooler, and the beer that leads its category for us. Gadget, Teak, Capy Snacks Cincinnati Black Raspberry, Stego, Spino and Missing Link.

Seasonal. A slot rather than a beer. Five or six pass through the same place in the lineup over the course of a year, and which one you find depends entirely on when you look.

Windfall. In an orchard, a windfall is fruit that has come down on its own and has to be used before it turns. Ours are the beers that arrive without much of a plan, live for a few months and then go for good. There is no waiting list and nothing comes back. If one of them turns out to be the best thing we made that year, that is the risk you run by being somewhere else on a Tuesday.

A million pounds of fruit

More than a million pounds of fruit come through this brewery in a year.

At that volume most of it arrives frozen, as aseptic puree in barrels, alongside juice both pure and concentrated. That is the unglamorous half of the answer and the only half that holds up, because two pounds a gallon has to survive a national footprint and taste the same in March as it did the previous September. Fruit sitting on a truck in July has no interest in anyone’s romantic ideas about fruit.

Every Wednesday we do the other thing. Fresh Fruit Tart is real fresh fruit, processed and blended in house and put into a keg of neutral base beer, and it exists for about a week before it is gone for good. There is no second run at it. If you want to know what a million pounds a year actually buys, it buys the confidence to spend a Wednesday on something that will not survive the weekend.