On a bright autumn day at the Viceroy Snowmass ski resort, Chad Yakobson, the 31-year-old owner of the Crooked Stave Artisan Beer Project, holds a goblet of a beer he makes called Surette. Like all of Crooked Stave’s styles, it’s made with Brettanomyces, or wild yeast, a category of beer that’s growing popular even as it fights a certain stigma of being overly bold. Brettanomyces, Latin for “British fungus,” appear on beer lists as wilds, funks and the term Yakobson likes the least, sours.
The clear Rocky Mountain light pouring through the window in Snowmass Village, Colo., illuminates the goblet like a straw-colored bulb.
“It’s grassy, citrusy and earthy,” Yakobson says to a gathering of two dozen people who have assembled for a seminar about Bretts. “The word people like right now is ‘rustic.’ It has vinous characteristics, like white wine.”
Almost all beer styles use domesticated yeast strains called Saccharomyces, and although there are long-established styles based on Brettanomyces — the fruit-backed Belgian lambics, for example — brewers tend to think of Bretts as mistakes, bad things that happened when you didn’t control your tanks and barrels.
Crooked Stave is small, producing just 1,255 barrels in 2014. Its offices and warehouses were recently renovated so the brewery and a new large front taproom with patio space could co-exist at the same location on the outskirts of downtown Denver. But Yakobson is building a reputation, and he spends a good deal of time on the road giving talks like this one.
