Some beer names take a paragraph to unpack. This one explains itself, as long as you know what a coupage is.
The word is French for cutting, in the sense of cutting one liquid with another. In the biere de coupage approach a brewery marries a spontaneously fermented beer that has spent a long time in barrel with a younger, fresher beer, and bottles the result. The old beer brings acidity, funk and the accumulated character of whatever wild yeast and bacteria found their way into it. The young beer brings fruit, brightness and the sugar that carbonates the bottle. Neither one is the beer. The blend is.
Between Worlds is Fonta Flora Brewery's newest, a 5.2 percent blended spontaneous ale aged on locally foraged elderflower.
The brewery has been working this format for a while now, and the variable each time is the flower. Mary's Gold took estate-grown marigold. Crimson used crimson clover. Brutus went to foraged dandelion. Elderflower continues a run of releases that treat the blend as a fixed method and the botanical as the thing that makes each one specific.
Elderflower is a good match for the format. The flat, creamy-white umbels of the elder are intensely aromatic, in a register closer to muscat grape and lychee than to anything most people would call floral, which is why the flower ended up as the backbone of a whole category of cordials. Against the acidity of an aged spontaneous beer, that perfume has something to push against rather than simply sitting on top.
It also comes with a deadline. Elder blooms for a few weeks in late spring and early summer and then it is finished for the year, so the flowers in a September bottle were picked months before anyone drank it. Foraged ingredients set the calendar, and the beer waits.
Fonta Flora is selling it in green bottles. Poured, it is hazy gold under a dense white head, and the label is given over entirely to a botanical drawing of an elder umbel.
Between Worlds is available starting September 11 through the brewery's wholesale accounts.
Source & Editorial
JollyPint independently prepares release articles using information published by breweries through newsletters, websites, and other official public communications. Brewery-supplied descriptions and tasting notes are reported as provided, while editorial context is added by JollyPint.