Alesong Brewing to host Beer and Wine "Terroir Festival" invitational
Alesong Brewing and Blending is set to host a small festival at their Eugene, Oregon countryside tasting room showcasing beers and winemakers involved in the growing world of beer/wine hybrids that some refer to as oenobeers. Tickets for the Saturday, September 24th event go on sale on July 10th for the event dubbed Terroir Festival and will be limited and likely all presold.
The fest will be headlined by the release of beers made as part of Firestone Walker’s multi-brewery collaboration Terroir Project, in which each participating brewery makes a beer beginning with the same base wort recipe and co-ferments it with grapes grown within 100 miles of their brewery, using only the naturally occurring yeast on the grape skins to drive the fermentation.
Alongside fellow collaborating breweries from the Terroir Project, Alesong has hand-selected brewery and winery friends from around the country that share a fascination with beer and wine, unique fermentations, and harnessing terroir by creating beverages with a distinctive component of time and place. Each featured brewery will be pouring one wine/beer hybrid and one unique beer of their choosing, which will surely result in a beer list unlike anything before seen at an Oregon beer festival. Beyond beer, the event will feature a handful of wineries, chefs, musicians, and artists for what’s sure to be a stunning afternoon in the Willamette Valley.
Alesong co-founder and production manager, Brian Coombs gushes with excitement as he describes the festival. “I’ve personally always been fascinated by wine and co-ferments, and we’ve of course done more than a little experimentation with wine beers here at Alesong! We’re honored to be the first hosts outside of Firestone Walker as the Terroir Project becomes a roving event with a new host each year and couldn’t be more excited to showcase Oregon wine country alongside this who’s who of breweries pushing the limits with these beers.”
The Terroir Festival will take place on the afternoon of September 24th at Alesong’s Countryside Brewery. Tickets will be limited and go on sale at 10am on July 20th on Alesong’s website – www.alesongbrewing.com/terroir-festival. Full brewery list and further details to come.
ABOUT ALESONG BREWING AND BLENDING: Alesong Brewing and Blending is a small artisan brewery based in the heart of Southern Willamette Valley wine country with a second tasting room in downtown Eugene. The all-barrel-aged brewery crafts unique and small-batch beers, brewing both wild and non-wild styles that span the flavor spectrum. Once the beer in barrels has matured, the team samples and selects each barrel individually to blend. Paying homage to old-world Lambic blenders and artisan winemakers, Alesong believes that the final, balanced blend of a barrel-aged beer is much more complex and satisfying than the sum of its parts or each individual barrel by itself. For more information, visit alesongbrewing.com.
ABOUT FIRESTONE WALKER’S TERROIR PROJECT: Conceived in its collaborative form beginning in 2017, the Terroir Project was started by Firestone Walker as a multi-brewery collaboration dedicated to blurring the genres of beer and wine to explore how ‘terroir’—or sense of place—drives what we taste. Each participating brewery is invited to produce its own distinct beer-wine hybrid, but with a few binding stipulations: they all have to use the same grain bill; the same methodology of handling the grapes (when possible); and the same co-fermented percentage of wort (51%) and wine grapes (49%) fermented with wild flora. All grapes must be grown within 100 miles of each brewery.