While most beers include only a few ingredients, an especially varied malt or hop bill might run the total up to as many as 15—and that’s pretty much the higher end of normal.
But there’s not much that’s normal about Scratch Brewing, the rural southern Illinois brewery known for its foraging, focus on terroir, and careful attention to flavor—all among the reasons the brewery and its taproom have been nominated for four James Beard Awards since opening in 2013.
Even at Scratch, however, the beer called 131—which gets its name from the number of ingredients that went into it—is an outlier.
“The concept kind of came from Chartreuse or [Centerba]—both of those have at least 100 herbs,” says Scratch cofounder Aaron Kleidon. “We were thinking about the combined taste of the forest—not so much any one single herb, but how they taste together.”
Kleidon’s partner at Scratch, Marika Josephson, says their strategy when using so many different ingredients is to use nearly everything in small amounts, then highlight only one or two ingredients. “For this beer, we wanted to emphasize sassafras leaves a little more because they have a nice, quaffable citrus [character] that felt like it would pull the drinkability through.”
Most of the other ingredients are in tiny volumes—“one or two stems or leaves,” she says. Altogether, it results in an herbaceous, floral beer without any one note being too overpowering. The ingredients don’t fight each other because of how they’re added, based on the experience that Josephson and Kleidon have in brewing with them and knowing what they can contribute.
“Everything that we used in 131 is something that we’ve used before in other beers,” Josephson says.
A Considered Process
On brew day, Scratch conducts a single-infusion mash at about 147°F (64°C). During the lauter, the duo walks out into the forest and the brewery’s garden to grab ingredients, which they add at various stages of the boil.
At least once per summer, in peak growing season, Scratch releases a beer with a long list of ingredients—but they’d never added as many as 131. Depending on the various ingredients, they’ll add them at two or three different points in the boil. For 131, Josephson says, they added their botanicals at 60 and 15 minutes left in the boil—balancing the earthy, spicy flavors from the earlier addition with the more citrus-floral aromas from the later addition that included sassafras leaves, fruit, and flowers. (When they use a third addition at the end of the boil, it’s for more delicate flavors that hold up better if boiled for a shorter period of time.)
For Scratch, 131 was about more than seeing how many ingredients could fit into a beer. It was a culmination of the expertise and know-how they have developed over the previous dozen years. “I don’t think we could’ve made this beer in the first year or two,” Josephson says. “In some ways, this represents the maturity of where we’re at with a lot of those plants.”
It took a lot of experimentation to get there. In Scratch’s early days, they were brewing more than 100 batches per year on a much smaller kit, “constantly tinkering and learning the ingredients,” Kleidon says.
Today, their large copper kettle produces about eight barrels of finished wort. Directly heated by a wood fire, its caramelization shows in the beers’ final mouthfeel and deeper color.
Knowing the Components
Josephson recommends that brewers who want to brew something similar think about their ingredients in multiple ways.
“For hickory, we use the leaf, the bark, and the seeds,” she says. “That’s one ingredient, three different ways.” That advice isn’t limited to foraged ingredients. “Even a carrot, we use the carrot tops all the time in beer. There’s so much flavor and aroma that you don’t necessarily think about or expect.”
For 131, the ingredients included savory herbs such as wild oregano, bee balm, perilla (an invasive plant that tastes kind of like licorice), Virginia mountain mint, dandelion root, basil, walnuts, burdock root, several mushrooms, honey, and much more. Josephson says roughly 60 percent of the ingredients were foraged, while the rest came from their on-site farm.
Josephson says that what’s fun about making beers like this is that it really gets people to think about their land and their plants in different ways and to be inspired by things unique to where they live. Adds Kleidon: “The goal of our beer is to create a sense of place.”
The choice of malt is intentional, too. Every three months, Scratch receives a shipment of several tons of grain from Sugar Creek Malt in Lebanon, Indiana, about 300 miles northeast of the brewery. Both Josephson and Kleidon like the flavor they get from those malts, but they also appreciate how Sugar Creek owners Caleb Michalke and Whitney Galvin-Michalke are liaisons between the farmers and the brewers—an important part of the chain.
Scratch sources most of its hops from Hallowed Hop Farms in Lewiston, Illinois. With its focus on foraged flavors, Scratch mainly uses hops for bittering—later aroma additions can compete too much with the aromatics of the other ingredients. For 131, the 90-minute boil got a single bittering charge at 60 minutes.
Not all their beers see a bittering charge. Scratch often uses hops as a way to control the level of acidity in its house yeast—a sourdough culture that they’ve been maintaining for about 15 years, both for their breads and their beers (see “Brewing with Sourdough Culture at Scratch,” beerandbrewing.com).
Sometimes the team won’t add any hops before fermentation, allowing more lactic acid to develop over the first 12–24 hours of fermentation. Then they add hops, which halt the souring, and Saccharomyces finishes out the fermentation. The result is a slightly tart, stable beer—and, because Scratch goes back to the mother yeast for each pitch, the strain never builds a resistance to hops.
To build up a starter, they’ll scrape off a piece of that sourdough culture about 20 hours before pitching, adding equal parts water and flour to feed it. For a typical eight-barrel batch, Kleidon says, they pitch about two gallons (eight liters) of slurry at 68–70°F (20–21°C), holding it there for a few days, allowing a free-rise into the mid-70s °F (24–25°C). It takes about three weeks to ferment and condition before it goes into a brite tank, then they bottle- or keg-condition to 2.8–3.2 volumes of CO2.
Evolution in the Bottle
Kleidon and Josephson say a beer like 131 benefits from a few months of conditioning in the package.
“There’s a three-month phase where it tastes earthy and kind of like dirt,” Kleidon says. “There’s a certain kind of bitterness to it. … Four to eight months is really a sweet spot for a lot of these saisons because by that time, any sediment has fallen to the bottom of the bottle.”
These beers tend to pour frothy, with flavors that lean more toward clean and herbal. The longer the beer ages, the more those savory herbs seem to show up in the forefront of the flavor profile.
“It’s kind of fun and challenging to see how much you can possibly get out of the woods and the farm,” Josephson says. “Aaron’s dream is to always outdo himself. I can almost guarantee that we will have one [in the future] that has more than 131 ingredients.”
Photos: Aaron Kleidon/courtesy Scratch
A Boatload of Botanicals
For 131, Scratch used some ingredients that were dehydrated or dried, others that were freshly foraged, and some that they picked fresh from their on-site garden. For especiallya delicate aromatic ingredients, you can also add a flameout addition to the recipe.
For a 5-gallon (19-liter) batch, Marika Josephson recommends filling up a 2-quart (2-liter) bowl with roughly equal proportions of plants and plant parts. (For the eight-barrel batch of 131, it was more like two-and-a-half 5-gallon/19-liter buckets of plant material.)
For ingredients that are more bitter, reduce them slightly compared to things with subtler character. For example, Josephson suggests one or two mushrooms, a dandelion root, a sprig of basil, one carrot and its top, a single walnut—just a little bit of everything you’re interested in using.
So, What Were Those 131 Ingredients?
“We counted different parts of the same plant as a separate ingredient—dandelion flowers, roots, and greens, for instance, as three—so the actual list of plants is a little smaller than 131,” Josephson says.
Here’s a list of most of them, to give you an idea of the many possibilities: ancho, arugula, barley, basil, bee balm, beets, blackberries, blueberries, carrots, celery, chanterelle mushrooms, cherry bark, clover, corn, dandelion, dill, elderflower, filé spice, ginger, grape must, hibiscus, hickory bark, honey, hyssop, juniper, lavender, lemon balm, lemongrass, marigold, mint, nettle, oak, oats, oregano, passion fruit, pawpaw, persimmon, plantain, raspberry, rose hips, rye, sassafras, shiso, spelt, sunflower seeds, thyme, tomato, turmeric, and walnuts.
