E-Malt.com News article: USA, TX: Fort Worth’s Collective Brewing Project reaches back to old Belgian farm tradition of saison brewing

The spirit of Fort Worth’s newest brewery, the Collective Brewing Project, reaches back to the old Belgian farm tradition of saison brewing, Dallas News reported on March 4.

The custom was for farm owners to brew beer in the fall or winter months for consumption in the summer by the farm workers. Typically, the larger farms had plenty of leftover grain to serve all of their workers, but the smaller farms would not. These farms would aggregate their grains in order to serve all of the workers in a gathering called a collective.

“It’s in that spirit that we have a cool place to gather here at the brewery,” Collective Brewing Project co-founder Ryan Deyo says.

The partnership between Deyo and co-founder Mike Goldfuss has been 18 years in the making, ever since the two were freshman at Carroll High School in Southlake, Texas. Despite Deyo’s role as head brewer, Goldfuss was actually the first of the two to begin homebrewing. In fact, Deyo wasn’t the biggest fan of his beer at first taste.

“That was back when I was still drinking stuff like Miller Lite,” Deyo says.

After working out the kinks, the two signed the lease on their current Southside property in April 2014. In June, while waiting on all the licenses, Collective soft-launched at the previous spot of Panther Island Brewing in Haltom City with a small, one-and-a-half-barrel system. Collective officially launched in Fort Worth under a brewpub license in November. Since the opening, the brewery has grown to a three-and-a-half-barrel system.

“Every home brewer dreams about it at some point, and there’s just a few that are stupid enough to try and do it,” Deyo says.

There is a lot that makes Collective unique, but one local trend the brewery helped pioneer is the crowler. No, that’s not a typo. A spin-off of the growler, the traditional method of taking craft beer to-go, the crowler is a can that can be filled and sealed on the spot. The Collective Brewing Project was one of the first on the crowler scene in the state of Texas.

John and Brian McCleery, both first time visitors from Mansfield, enjoy the crowler trend for its convenience to share.

“It’s good for shipping to other people, and cheaper to fill up than a growler in glass,” John McCleery says.

What makes the crowlers even better for customers is that the beer keeps within the can. Deyo recalled that his partner Goldfuss opened up a can in January that was packaged just before Thanksgiving in 2014, and it still maintained its fizziness and great taste.

“It’s kind of a neat thing to see someone package your beer for you,” Deyo says.

Collective is continually up to something new with a new beer virtually every month from its “Funkytown” series, which features brewers’ farmhouse and sour projects. The Funkytown series includes barrel-aged beers fermented with ingredients like Brettanomyces bruxelensis and wild yeast, in what is called mixed-culture fermentation.

“We want to be the ambassadors for that kind of style here in North Texas,” Deyo says.


06 March, 2015