A Classic New Oregon Beer is Coming to Fruition
Earlier in the month, as you are probably aware, Oregon breweries nabbed 18 medals at the Great American Beer Festival (GABF) in Denver. One of those breweries, Oregon City Brewing Company (OCB), won a Bronze (Specialty Berliner-Style Weisse) for its Coming to Fruition: Cherry. This is just the latest in an amazing run of accolades that rival and even exceed the awards for more hyped fruited “sours” by arguably more prominent breweries.
Since 2018 Coming to Fruition Cherry has earned the following medals at prestigious competitions:
Bronze Medal - 2018 GABF “Mixed-Culture Brett Beer”
Bronze Medal - 2019 Oregon Beer Awards “Brett + Mixed Culture Beers”
Bronze Medal - 2020 Best of Craft Beer Awards “Mixed-Culture Brett Beer or Wild Beer”
Bronze Medal - 2021 NABA Beer Awards “Brett Beer, Classic Gose”
Bronze Medal - 2021 US Open Beer Championships “Brett Beer”
GOLD Medal - 2022 Best of Craft Beer Awards “Brett Beer”
GOLD Medal - 2022 Oregon Beer Awards “Fruited Mixed Culture Beers”
Silver Medal - 2022 World Beer Cup “Specialty Berliner-Style Weisse”
Bronze Medal - 2022 GABF “Specialty Berliner-Style Weisse”
I’ve written about the brewery’s business news numerous times for New School, going all the way back to when they launched on the (now bustling) corner in downtown Oregon City to most recently on their expansion at the former Canby Library. But, over the past half-decade or so I’ve never interviewed Brewmaster David Vohden. With their recent win, a chat was due.
Oregon City Brewing Company’s Brewmaster David Vohden holding his Gold award for Coming to Fruition: Cherry at the 2022 OBAs earlier this year.
David got his start in the brewery business at 13 Virtues in 2009, and stayed there until 2015, working with a 300-400 barrel-a-year system. “It was really low-key and I got a lot of great experience,” he says. Then in January 2016, he bolted to Oregon City Brewing, where at the time they had 40 taps of beer but only four to six of their own beers. “The owner called me, we had a mutual friend who suggested he reach out to me, and I came in and loved the place and loved the family that owns it. It was a really great move for me,” he says.
By the end of 2016, Vohden says he had dialed the core eight or 10 recipes then the next year the seven-barrel system was installed, “geared towards the idea that we had 40 taps and I wanted to fill as many of those with our own beer as possible.” OCB made major upgrades to the equipment throughout his first year and was fully functional again at the beginning of 2017. Since then they have added more capacity (tanks, barrels, kegs), have about tripled production since then, and will have more room to grow at their Oregon City and soon-to-open Canby locations.
It was during this time (and his time at 13 Virtues really) that he’d started seeing and tasting sours around town. Since he lived in Oak Grove at the time, near Breakside’s Milwaukie taproom, he spent time there and says he had a sour by Upright called Blend Edmunds (a nod to Breakside’s Ben Edmunds). “It was the quintessential example of a sour that I wanted to drink, and therefore brew. It was incredibly complex and characterful like the Belgian lambics I had had, but also approachable and easy-drinking, fruit-forward sours like the Cascade beers I admired. I had also been to Upright’s modest basement brewing facilities. Upright and Blend Edmunds served as an example of someone with similar resources making truly incredible sours and that empowered me to put in the work and make it happen at my new job at OCB.”
After exploring other sours (both here and in Michigan), borrowing ideas from Berliner Weisse Brewing, and then mixing them with wild barrel-aged beers, he was able to get on the path to his award-winning sour. “I just practiced a lot of different techniques and we ended up filling probably about 60 oak barrels with that same base beer that the Coming To Fruition Cherry is made out of,” he says. (There have been 18 batches of Coming to Fruition over 9 different individual fruit variations.)
In a nutshell, Vohden explains how the award-winning beer was crafted.
“Make a wheat beer with high-quality (we used imported Germany) wheat and pilsner base malt (so the flavor isn’t lost after being in a barrel for a year), pre-acidify your wort to the low 3.0s and ferment with a healthy blend of a clean house ale yeast and a fruit-forward Brett strain (we use Imperial’s Suburban Brett),” he says.
And of course add lots of ripe, high-quality fruit.
For the cherry, he used about three pounds per gallon of fresh, ripe Montmorency cherries, with the pits, lightly mashed. The beer sat on the fruit for the last 2-4 months of aging depending on the barrel and fruit, while the cherries were on the shorter side of that range.
“We got a lot of practice with the base beer and made four really excellent barrels of the cherry-based beer. And that ended up being just a superior batch than any of the other blends we ever did,” he adds.
Soon, you’ll be able to see more of the sour beers. The brewery’s new location (“opening in nine months or so”) will host all of its barrel-aged products.
“When you go in, you'll see where all the sours will be made, and we'll probably do the spirit barrel beers there too. Though all of our Coming To Fruition success will be based out of Canby in the future, we’ll still brew sours at the main location but we’ll age the wort and package the beer at Canby.”
A case could be made that Coming to Fruition: Cherry should be held up in the same regard as all-time classic fruited sour beers from the likes of Cascade Brewing, De Garde Brewing, Bend Brewing, and Alesong Brewing & Blending.
Oregon City Brewing celebrates their 8th anniversary with a party on Saturday, Nov. 5th, owner Bryce Morrow says he will likely be breaking out a case of Coming to Fruition: Cherry to celebrate the occasion.
