the 941

Ed. note: This piece, by Bethany Sherwin, will appear in next week’s issue of Creative Loafing.

Michigan brewery Jolly Pumpkin Artisanal Ales has nothing to do with seasonal gourd beers and everything to do with open-air fermentation, exotic French and Belgian yeast strains, oak barrel aging and bottle conditioning. All their beers are funky, spicy and sour, packed full of Brettanomyces and Lactobacillus.

Jolly’s Maracaibo Especial is a 7.5 percent ABV Belgian-inspired brown ale made from all natural ingredients — barley, wheat, hops, yeast and water, brewed with cacao and spiced with cinnamon and orange peel. After fermentation, the brew matures in oak barrels for several months and, after bottling, goes in the cellar for a few more months. The process by which it’s crafted is drastically different from the rapid, highly mechanized assembly line production of mainstream domestics; this type of beer simply has more soul.

All of Jolly Pumpkin’s beers are marked with a batch or blend number, with every batch and blend a little different. My bottle — Batch 349 — was obtained at Leukens in Dunedin, but I have also seen them in the cooler at Whole Foods.

Three four nine is an older batch from November 2008, and as soon as the cap came off, the mouth oozed khaki foam like a sudsy volcano. This is normal, so be prepared. Wrap a few paper towels around the bottle’s neck, like a funnel, and let it mellow out for about 10 minutes. This style of beer tastes best around 60 degrees Fahrenheit, after the flavors have had time to develop, the yeast stirred up by uncapping has resettled, and the active carbonation from bottle conditioning has subsided.

Jolly’s Maracaibo deserves to be poured into a tulip or snifter, at a 45-degree angle, gently enough to leave the yeast in the bottle. In the glass, it looks like a lighter bodied version of an English Brown Ale, slightly cloudy with a topcoat of pinhead-sized bubbles that hang around till the final sip. The farmhouse funk of Brettanomyces yeast wafts from the glass, with mildly detectable traces of citrus, cedar and cinnamon.

The flavor isn’t sour like a lemon or vinegar, and it’s not sweet-sour like Sour Patch Kids or Sweet Tarts. It’s more like sourdough graham crackers with a slightly dusty Belgian chocolate funkiness that comes out in the finish.

Curious to try the beer but think it might be too much for you? Try pairing it with a slice of key lime pie. The citric tartness will make the brew seem less sour, and the pie crust will mesh well with the earthy graham cracker essence of Brett yeast.

Although some are noted for possessing unbalanced yeast flavor characteristics, I adore all of the Jolly Pumpkin beers. They cellar wonderfully, increasing in complexity with age, especially Jolly’s ES Bam, Madrugada Obscura, and La Roja. To me these beers are so complex, with such unusual flavors; drinking one is like going someplace exotic.

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