Horse Tongue Wheat: What Most Likely Really Happened
Our Horse Tongue Wheat beer is regularly recognized as a strangely named but singularly outstanding beer, but few people understand just how unique it is. Over the years the marketing copy has described it as “a light Belgian style wheat beer, barrel fermented with a mixed culture of both yeast and bacteria,” but that’s nowhere near the whole story. The soul of this beer is the mixed culture that we use in fermentation, which has several types of yeast and bacteria that each bring their own individual character to the beer. This culture is unique to our property and how we discovered this culture is one of the most interesting stories in craft beer: The Legend of Horse Tongue Wheat.
“The horses, being smart, were interested in the beer.”
In 2008, a collection of Irish Shire horses lived in one of the buildings on the brewery property. Logically called “The Stables” the building was also where we would age and develop our barrel aged beers. The horses, being smart, were interested in the beer. One day an assistant brewer came upon one of the enormous horses happily licking beer out of a wine barrel containing a special batch of wheat beer. Realizing that he had messed up by placing the barrel close enough to the stall to allow the horse to pull the bung and help himself, our intrepid assistant brewer briefly panicked but recovered himself, replaced the bung, moved the barrel and then courageously spoke not a word of the episode to anyone.
Some time later the brewing staff convened in their periodic sampling of the barrel aged beers. To everyone’s surprise there was an extraordinary barrel of wheat beer that stood out from the rest. After a good bit of research and analysis trying to figure out why this one barrel seemed to develop better than the others, the assistant brewer told the rest of the brewing staff about the thirsty horse and that the barrel in question was the one he had caught the horse drinking from. Being a hearty lot, the brewing staff took new samples for tasting and lab analysis and realized that they had a delicious beer of unique provenance and distinction. And thus – Horse Tongue Wheat was born.
Since that day, the brewery has been using that same culture to inoculate its barrel-soured beers. We’re proud to be fermenting with a mixed culture that is found only on the Anderson Valley Brewing Company’s own property. We have, however, professionalized the process and we do not use actual horses in the inoculation. Instead we sent the original to a laboratory to clean, isolate and propagate the culture. Horse Tongue Wheat is aged for over nine months in used barrels acquired from local wineries and bottled in limited quantities.
So, what’s the lesson in all this? We’re not really sure, but man is this beer good.
