The Origins of American Wild Ales
In 1993, Deb and Dan Carey released Wisconsin Belgian Red, the third beer they made at their new Wisconsin brewery, New Glarus. It was one of the country’s first “sour” ales, and it created quite a stir—and not just because it was so unusual. The Careys weren’t experimenting with an obscure one-off. This was meant to be a regular-production beer.
Following a visit to Belgium and a tour of Lindemans in the mid-1980s, brewer Dan Carey had gotten interested in lambics and the process of making spontaneously-fermented beer. While he and Deb moved around the country for various jobs, Dan experimented with spontaneous fermentation. Entrepreneur Deb watched his experiments mature, and when they started producing tasty and accomplished beers, she suggested that they should start a brewery to feature them. So when Belgian Red debuted, years before Spotted Cow, it was a signature feature of their portfolio. More than thirty years later, it still is.
On this month’s One Iconic Beer, I speak with Dan Carey and Jeff Sparrow, the author of the landmark 2005 book Wild Brews about Wisconsin Belgian Red. In this episode, we unpack why the beer was such a pivotal experiment in putting the US on track to make, for lack of any better term, wild ales. It’s a fascinating story, and an important one.
No single beer is ever entirely responsible for starting a style (a point that gets made in next month’s episode, about the one beer that has the best argument for it). Certainly, the wild ale tradition owes most of its inspiration to the brewers in Belgium, and especially the lambic-brewers. Nevertheless, Dan Carey’s role in bringing that back to the US, doing it properly, and making a beer people actually wanted to drink is a major factor in why this style ever made it here at all.
When people think of New Glarus, they think of Spotted Cow, which certainly qualifies as iconic on its own. Yet of the two beers, Wisconsin Belgian Red may cast the longer shadow. Before there was an Allagash coolship or a Russian River horny tank, before the Brett Pack trekked to Brussels, before Jeff Sparrow wrote Wild Brews, there was Wisconsin Belgian Red. It may not have been the very first wild ale made in the US, but it was the one made intentionally rather than experimentally, and it’s the one that endures.
I hope you listen to the show even if you haven’t had the beer or aren’t a huge fan of the style. It’s a fascinating bit of history, and you really don’t want to miss Dan Carey’s stories. You can listen in the embedded link or find it at one of your finer podcast services: