We are excited to announce that Wildflower x Ester Daily Bread will be available at our cellar door and online (at 2pm) on February, 1 2019.
Daily Bread is a Kvass-inspired Australian Wild Ale made with surplus bread from Ester's woodfired oven.
I love the bread at Ester. I'm pretty sure I'm not alone here, but Benny and I are those people who order seconds and thirds of their sourdough before the first dish even arrives. I know, I know dont fill up on the bread and all that, but seriously, I bet you have the same impulse.
Well guess what, there are, on the off days, some nights of service where they do not serve all the loaves of that morning's bake.... I know insane... who isn't doing their part? Anyway, last August I was in at the restaurant doing a delivery or something and I saw these surplus loaves and asked if I could start collecting them. So for the next three months, I dropped in on my way home once a week to save these loaves from certain death by bin and instead brought them back to the brewery. We froze them and built up an old bread store large enough to feed a small family for a couple weeks. Then in late October, Nick (the director of beverages at Ester) can around to Marrickville and we sliced the thawed bread for a good 2.5 hours... we ended up with 8 malt sacks full of sliced Ester sourdough. Below is a look into one of them...
A few days later, the bread was dried and we brewed a new lightly dark 3.5% ABV recipe with pale malt (Campbell), Vienna malt (Voyager) and raw rye all the while keeping the bread as the star of the show at over 30% of the total grain weight (have a look at the mash below). I wanted to keep the ABV very low as to pay homage to traditional Kvass (0.5-1% ABV). Since we used malted barley in making this product for the fermentables rather than sugar or fruit, I would submit Daily Bread to be inspired by kvass rather than an example of the drink. We mashed slightly warm for complete fermentation, lightly hopped with Saaz (CZ) and pitched our house culture of brewers yeast and foraged wild yeast and bacteria from New South Wales. The beer aged in stainless for 2 weeks before being packaged on 17 October 2018. It then conditioned in bottle, as all our beers do, for 15 weeks. Daily bread is 3.5% ABV.
At release, the aroma is dominated by cereal and toast with smoky undertones. Its palate is lively and crisp with a clean acidity and salinity lending some surprising length to a low alcohol beer.
Like all our beers, Daily Bread is best enjoyed when decanted off a settled natural yeast sediment at cellar temperatures (10-12°C).
