By Lucy Hine

Since Futtle started life in 2019, we’ve been releasing a range of slightly niche, but also (we hope) approachable, tasty beers.

Our rustic, farmhouse-style Table Beers, Pales, Wheat Beers and Sours are unique to us in lots of ways (our ingredients, water source, yeast culture, use of foraged plants and final flavour) but certainly not unrecognisable to the general Scottish public as beer.

These are brews that have all been fermented with a yeast culture that we propagate and pitch ourselves. The fermentation is more controlled as a result and we can be pretty confident of achieving the outcome we want.

We call these releases our regular beers, which is not intended to diminish them, but rightly to suggest that there’s another, more unusual side to the brewery, that involves a really magical triumvirate of i. wild yeasts, ii. wooden barrels and iii. lots of time.

This month we’re releasing the first beers from our barrel store, after years of waiting, and so we thought it might be a nice opportunity to reflect on what we’ve learnt so far about barrel ageing and this wilder sort of brewing.

In 2018, when we were still trying to get the brewery off the ground, we made a return trip to Brussels to soak up the beer culture there and make our first pilgrimage to Cantillon.

Funnily enough, there was an issue with our travel plans which I can’t recall exactly now, but it meant that Stephen had to travel back to the UK on the morning of the scheduled Cantillon visit, leaving me alone to wander leisurely across town to the unassuming 125-year-old, Anderlecht home of the great Lambic brewer. (Obviously I would have enjoyed it more in his company, but it still turned out to be a pretty special day).

You come in off the street at Cantillon, are welcomed inside, and the effect is pretty immediate and profound. Just the way it all feels and smells. You’re shown round the brewhouse, filled with ancient-looking vessels and not a lot (if any) stainless steel in sight. Then it’s up to the loft where the coolship sits, in all of its cobwebbed glory, and then on to the hallowed cellars full of resting barrels. I found the time I spent there to be pivotal in driving a lot of what Futtle went on to become.

It was clear at that time that we would have a very slow and expensive journey ahead, making wilfully uncommercial products, that might find space in the hearts of a few curious drinkers if we were lucky.

Lambic beer, like Cantillon, is a traditional beer style from the Pajottenland region of Belgium, known for its unique flavour and complexity, which is achieved through wild fermentation and long maturation in wood.

Fermentation is not achieved with a brewery-cultivated yeast, but with wild microflora and airborne yeasts found in the brewery’s own atmosphere.

Once a batch has been inoculated, normally while resting overnight in a copper cooling tray called a ‘coolship’, the unfermented brew is then transferred to wooden barrels to ferment over a much longer time.

It can take weeks for fermentation to start, and many more months for it to complete, depending on the time of year and the ambient temperature in the brewery. (A regular beer will ferment over 3-7 days by comparison (or much faster still in a macro brewery)).

After this ‘wild’ fermentation has happened inside the barrel, the beer is then left for several years to develop and condition.

The individual barrels will become components in aged blends, that are released after 1, 2 or 3 years, or when they become ready. Sometimes fruit is added to the barrels to create a secondary fermentation, which results in the famous cherry and plum beers that come from this part of Belgium.

‘Lambic’ is a term that is protected and only associated with breweries within the Pajottenland region. But essentially what we have been working towards at Futtle is creating a ‘lambic-style’ beer, which is faithful to this very unusual, and extremely delicious style of beer.

We’re certainly not the first to be inspired in this way by the great Belgian blenderies and breweries. The flavours and complexity you get from this form of brewing and ageing are ones that you cannot achieve in any other way.

However we are one of only a tiny handful of breweries around the world that are still persevering with making beer this way.

The difficulties and expense involved in brewing like this isn’t for everyone. The underlying premise is that you completely surrender any control you have as a brewer and wait to see what nature will give you. Our intervention is non-existent, until it comes time to bottle. I think it’s probably the style that suits us most - far more reliant on nature, than science.

Last month, we did a big reorganisation of the barrel store at the brewery. We tasted every cask, re-numbered everything, made notes and selected a couple of casks of organic wild beer for release. They’re not quite ready, of course, as even after they’ve been bottled, they need even more time to condition in the bottle.

As well as our fully wild-fermented beer, we have also been experimenting with other ways that wood, oxygen and time can create flavour. We have chosen regular organic beer batches (fermented with brewery yeast, rather than wild yeast) to referment and/or condition in wooden barrels. This is sometimes called ‘mixed fermentation’ and would normally allow you to create a product a little more quickly.

Of course, as you know, speed is not our strong suit. So even these beers have been many years in the making. We’re getting ready to release our first two from the barrel store this week which we’ll be opening for a celebration in the brewery and Dundee next week.

The Beers:

Barrel Ageing Beer

History of Drink in the East Neuk (Part 2): Temperance & Rebellion in the Villages