This beer is pretty cool. It’s quite different than anything we have ever made before and the result is as fascinating as it’s story. Yabai Ne is an Australian Wild Ale made with toasted wheat, koji barley, aged hops and traditional shoyu moromi. The beer was conceptualised, made and named by our friend Jean Baptiste Courderesse during his one month harvest stay here at Wildflower. JB is a French winemaker who has been hopping between Northern and Southern Hemisphere harvests since 2015 and came to work with us this year before grape harvest to learn about grain fermentations, how we work with fruit and a whole slew of other things. I’ve known JB since 2017 when he was working at 10 William St for a short time and our common obsession with fermentation founded a quick friendship. So when he reached out late last year about assisting us during our harvest, the answer was easy as I was excited for us to learn from each other. In addition to wine, JB spent a year in Japan learning about koji and parallel grain ferments making sake with Terada Honke amongst others. This is something I’ve been very keen to explore personally and the impetus for starting another batch of shoyu while he was here. In Australia, JB has worked with friends of ours Gareth and Rainbow Belton of Gentle Folk wines and Andrew Burchell of Good Intentions while in Europe making wine in Savoie, France and the Lower Kamp Valley in Austria. Some of you may know or have tasted a wine he made at Good Intentions last year, MAAR. There may be a few bottles floating around on the internet still 🤷♂️. While JB was here, I offered to him to make a batch of beer entirely of his imagination. It’s always fun seeing what people without beer backgrounds want to do with beer. The result of that offer is Yabai Ne. JB wanted to blend the koji fermentations we were working on at the time with our beer ferments as well as a few other flavours he was interested in. So to make this we took raw wheat to Ester and toasted it in their wood fired oven along with some raw soybean. A potion of the wheat was steamed and the soybeans boiled then inoculated with koji for a 48hr + monitored fermentation by the koji. These fermented grains were put into a brine to make a moromi with the intention of making soy sauce. On brew day, we milled in organic schooner and the other portion of toasted wheat from Ester and mashed in. In the mash, we added a portion of the toasted soybean/wheat moromi which aided in the enzymatic activity on the mash as well as adding a serious whack of funk. The beer was boiled with aged hops and fresh Ryefield hops before being knocked out straight into puncheon and fermented then aged there for 4 months. Over this time, the beer evolved from an awkward, top and tail beer to what we have now in the bottle. The tasting notes for Yabai Ne were difficult to write as the aromas were so complex and evolving, it was difficult to ever pin one or two things down. However, we reckon the aromas open with a cheesy aged hop character, an intense saison spice and peach flesh overtones. The palate is full and viscous with a big hit of umami and a bitter, young lambic-esq finish. Overall, its engaging to say the least... we opened three bottles just to keep looking for all the different flavours. The artwork for the beer is courtesy of JB, a film photo he took of a valley in Japan while he was there in 2018. I reckon it turned out awesome. The name for the beer is, as JB explains, Japanese slang for something being really cool, or wicked. A break from our solely local language named beers, it’s what he chose for his beer. We have plans to continue working in implementing koji into beer and this has been a great first look at what it can do!
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