This Friday, July 10th, we're releasing the latest from our foeder fermenter - Shaku Yameme in bottle and on draft at both locations!

Shaku Yamame - Blended foeder fermented, mixed-culture beer & puncheon-aged, mixed-culture farmhouse ale w/kumquats & green tea; citrus, tannin, earthy 5.6% 18 IBUs

This beer is a blend of base beer from the same foeder that Ambient Roar came from and a 1-year old puncheon-aged, mixed-culture farmhouse ale. The foeder has a base of pilsner malt, kamut, spelt and einkorn. After blending the two beers, we added Fukushu kumquats. These are a type of kumquat grown in Japan and known for their sweetness followed by a nice tart finish. You can eat the whole fruit, rind and all. We sourced ours from a specialty citrus grower in California called Pearson Ranch. We wanted to green tea to this beer but needed some schooling on it. We contacted our friends at The Jasmine Pearl Tea Company and tasted through a number of varieties. While this beer was mostly conceptualized as being influenced by elements of Japanese culture, in the end, we settled on using 75% of a Chinese variety called, Chunmee. It has a floral, nutty mouthfeel with characters of white flower and woodiness. For the remaining 25%, we used Tsuyuhikari Shincha. This Japanese variety comes across as oceanic, or like blanched greens and steamed rice, and is more tannic than the Chunmee. We didn't want the tea to overpower the kumquats or the base beer, so we cold steeped them in the beer until the flavor was perfect. We both bottle and keg conditioned the beer and matured it until it was ready.

Finally, we get to the name. Shaku is an old Japanese measure of length roughly equaling 1 foot. The Yamame is the name of the cherry trout that live in certain streams in Japan. Because of certain conditions, these fish only live 2 to 3 years and rarely get bigger than 1 foot. This is considered a trophy fish in Japanese fly-fishing.

More can be found here if anyone is interested: kawasakiflyfishing.wordpress.com/tag/shaku-yamame