Australian Wild Ales made on Cadigal-Wangal Land. Delivering beers with length, nuance and subtlety.
Wildflower focuses on fermenting beers with a mixed house culture of brewers yeast mixed with wild yeast and bacteria foraged from New South Wales.
Wildflower’s goal is to balance the tart, funky characteristics of their house culture in order to deliver beers with length, nuance and subtlety.
Run by an ex-Texan who has spent time in France, Belgium the UK and back with Jester King in Texas, Topher Boehm is an expat with an astrophysics background.
He co-founded Wildflower in 2017 with brother-in-law Chris Allen. Wild Flower are based in Marrickville, an Inner West Sydney suburb.
‘You won’t find the mixture of yeasts that makes all of the beers at Wildflower anywhere else. You can’t buy it, a lab doesn’t propagate it for me and I’m pretty sure I couldn’t even replicate it. I developed the house culture by wrangling yeast from New South Wales over the course of 2016. While the methods to do this resemble that first attempt of mine, I’d learned a lot in the years between. The wild yeasts and bacterias in our culture come from plants and spontaneous batches of beer made around the state.’
‘In the right conditions and in the presence of a good culture of yeast, a beer made with a mixed culture will mature over time (especially well in a barrel) and develop more complex, sour and funky flavours. Some of these esters and flavours can be pretty intense and can throw the beverage out of balance. It can get overly acidic, or hyper funky.
So what we do at Wildflower is blend the beer in our barrels to create a composition of flavour. Blending is like painting and each barrel in my stock is a new colour that I can use. Alone it might be boring, everything mixed together would muddle the canvas, it’s about incrementally building something that is greater than the sum of its parts using some restraint to keep it all in balance. A lot of the time for us this mainly means blending older stock with newer stock. The older beer can bring strong earthy, acidic, funky notes while the younger beer brings freshness, brightness, fresh hop aroma and spicy fermentation characteristics to the the blend. It’s not about trying to get a ‘best of both worlds’ beer, it’s about developing length and nuance in a drink.’
Wildflower certainly achieve that – one of their best examples being the incredible ‘Table Beer’ that they brew – a spritzy, citrussy 2.9% beer with plenty of backbone, and a little white pepper and lime. One of the best table beers we have ever tried. Hands down.
