Introducing Wildflower St Phoebe 2020

We are very excited to announce that Wildflower St Phoebe 2020 will be available online and for tasting and take-away/collection at our cellar door from 12pm (Sydney time) on Friday 6 November 2020. 

St Phoebe is an Australian Wild Ale refermented with plums. While the beer is named for Chris and his wife Emily's first daughter, Saint Phoebe was a first century deaconess from modern day Greece. In 2020, this beer was made from golden mixed fermentation, barrel aged beer and 722kg of fresh, tree ripened Ebony Sun plums hand picked from Thornbrook Orchard in Nashdale, NSW.

As you may recall, the previous two editions of St Phoebe were made with raspberries. Despite our best efforts to source fresh local berries grown in a sustainable way, we were again facing the prospect of having to use frozen fruit. This hasn't sat well with us and whilst there was a lot to like about those raspberry beers, we made the choice to change fruits for St Phoebe and the 2020 edition is made with Ebony Sun plums from Thornbrook Orchard in Orange, NSW. Paula and her team at Thornbrook grow amazing fruit and it's really pleasing to be able to work with their fresh, tree ripened and hand picked fruit this year not only in St Phoebe but also St Thomas, St Henry and St Abigail. We've worked with plums from Thornbrook in 2018 and 2019 in our Collective beers and loved the way this particular stone fruit grown by Paula works with our culture. Our preference for fresh fruit comes from our desire to bring the microbiology from the farm into the ferment, like we do with our wine grape referments. We feel that we can get a more expressive fermentation from specific fruits if we allow the native yeast residing on the fruit to be active in the ferment, hence our strong preference to work with fresh rather than frozen fruit.

St Phoebe 2020 was made in a similar manner to St Abigail and St Thomas whereby we source and macerate whole, real fruit from Nashdale with barrel ripened Gold from our cellar. This year, the beer had a whole four months to hang out with these plums and soak up every last bit of their sweet plummy goodness before being blended and bottled in early July 2020. For 17 weeks the beer went through its ultimate fermentation in bottle for carbonation and conditioning concurrently. At this month of release, it is 5.6% ABV and super tasty. Strong skinsy pinot gris pet nat vibes. Lifted nose, perfumed (rose water) and full of ripe sweet fruit. Surprisingly funky and with a dark spice complexity. The palate shines, beautiful, subtly pretty integration with the fruit, creamy carbonation, sweet purple fruits and a moreish gentle acidity to finish.