BridgePort Brewing Company to Release Its Inaugural Fruit Ale

By Angelo De Ieso II

On April 24, 2008, Oregon’s oldest craft brewery, BridgePort will release the Stumptown Tart—a Belgian ale aged in pinot noir barrels and blended with a healthy amount of fresh Oregon marion berries. BridgePort brewmaster Karl Ockert says of the Tart “I’ve never done a beer like this. Period.” The base beer for the Tart was a Belgian golden ale that finished at about 8% ABV. “We split off about a third of that and we went to Carlton Wine Studio and picked up 23 French oak casks.




On April 3rd, with the other two-thirds Ockert and company employed 2,000 pounds of Oregon marion berries and refermented with the fruit. They then blended the two with yeast and sugar for bottle fermentation. The beer was bottled on April 7th. The Stumptown Tart is a bold, extreme beer for which Ockert is realistic. “It’s an expensive beer to produce. We may never do this again.” He also recommends tasting the beer sooner than later. “It should age fairly well, but the fresh fruit character will be lost over time. It’s probably best to enjoy over the summertime and move on.” “We’re bottling up 1,800 cases (of 22-ouncers) and hoping to sell it throughout the summer” says Ockert. “I’m not sure if we’ll need any more or not.”






So what was the inspiration behind this innovative new brew? “I’ve always been impressed with a good friend of mine in New Glarus, Wisconsin named Dan Carey who makes something called the New Glarus Red” explains Ockert. “It’s a really great Belgian cherry red ale with a really delicious little tart, sour finish to it. So I wanted to do something like that. So, I emailed him to ask him how to do that. And he promptly emailed back and said, ‘I’ll tell you about anything else in the brewery, but I won’t tell you how I make New Glarus Belgian reds.’ So I kind of came up with this one on my own.”









BridgePort’s Stumptown Tart ale will be made available following it release party at the BridgePort brewpub and bakery at 1313 NW Marshall St. in Portland, Oregon on April 24, 2008 from 5pm-8pm. Bernie Dexter, the model who appears on the bottle’s label with also be present at the kickoff to sign labels. This is a free event.

Fermented Clothing?!?

The geek in me is grinning from ear to ear after reading this:

Bugs Make Dress Smell Like Old Wine

Here's a brief excerpt:

Australian researchers have combined art and science to make dresses from fermented fabric, using bacteria to 'grow' slimy dresses from wine and beer.

"We're looking at [the dresses] to provoke some discussion about future fashions, about the possibility of other material we can use instead of our normal cottons and silks," says Gary Cass, who works on the Micro'be' project at the University of Western Australia.

Cass is a laboratory technician at the university who, among other things, writes science fiction.

He says he was inspired to grow the dresses when he was working in a vineyard many years ago.

He noticed that when oxygen got into the vats and turned the wine into vinegar, a slimy, rubbery layer grew on top.

This layer was cellulose, produced by acetobacter bacteria as a waste product when they convert wine into vinegar.

To ferment fabrics, Cass and his colleagues deliberately let vats of wine go off to produce cellulose.

And to get the shape of a dress, they lifted the layers of slimy cellulose off and laid them over a deflatable doll.

After each dress was complete, they deflated the doll and removed it, leaving the dress intact.

"It's the bacteria that are weaving all these fibres together," says Cass. "We're not using any machines, sewing machines and so forth."

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Just think, if they can figure out how to polymerize the fibers to increase their strength and rigidity they could theoretically create a bottle made of cellulose and package the beer inside of itself. Plus, since it would be made from cellulose (aka plant fiber) it would be biodegradable. How cool is that?