Foraging for Fermentables: (Safely) Using Local Ingredients

This article originally appeared in the March/April 2016 issue of Zymurgy Magazine

By Stan Hieronymus

[Above: Todd Boera at Fonta Flora Brewing in North Carolina created a bright red Appalachian saison called Beets, Rhymes and Life, made with Bluebird Farm’s bull’s blood beets.]

Almost 300 years before American brewers learned how to use corn to further popularize their lagers, would-be colonists in Virginia made what they called beere with the grain. Thomas Hariot described the process in a narrative about the unsuccessful effort to establish a settlement on Roanoke Island, part of what would become North Carolina, between 1584 and 1586.

“Pagatown is a kind of graine, so called by the inhabitants; the same in the West Indies is called mayze. Englishmen call it Guinney wheate, or Turkie wheate, according to the names of the countreys from whence the like hath been brought,” he wrote fewer than 100 years after Columbus’ men first encountered the native American grain. “The graine is about the bignesse of our ordinary English peaze and not much different in forme and shape, but of diverse colors—some white, some red, some yellow and some blew. All of them yeelde a very white and sweet flowre, being used according to his kinde it maketh a very good bread. Wee made of the same in the country some mault, wherof was brued a good ale as was to be desired. So, likewise, by the help of hops, thereof may bee made as good beere.”

Newcomers to America produced plenty of beers with native ingredients during the following centuries, but as Stanley Baron wrote in Brewed in America about a beer made from peaches, those “did not change the direction of brewing.” The first settlers turned to alternative sources for fermentables and looked elsewhere for ones that would take the place of hops, since they were trying to brew beers that tasted like the ones they left behind.

Access the full article in the March/April 2016 Zymurgy magazine.

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