[12/19 Update: This will be sold at the Ann Arbor pub on NYE, not at the Dexter brewery. Also, Ron Jeffries has added a video in which he briefly discusses the beer on Youtube which I have added below. Finally, considering it is a blend of batches from multiple years, it may be more accurate to call this a Gueuze but I’m not sure what the brewery’s position is on that. And it looks like this started in October 2005 (not early 2005 as Jeffries implied here) so closer to four years than five.]

(Dexter, MI) – Lambic has a thirty-year history here in the U.S. dating back to when Lindeman‘s products were first introduced by Merchant Duvin back in 1979. Among American breweries, the early part of that history is still being written before our eyes. Washington-based The Grey Parrot, Russian River Brewing, Allagash Brewing, and Jolly Pumpkin appear to be some of the first to tread into traditional Lambic territory, all within the last several years.

This week, there is more news to be excited about with respect to American breweries experimenting with spontaneously fermented beer than anytime in recent memory. Yesterday, I discussed the release of Allagash Brewing’s Lambic-style beer, first brewed through the use of its own “coolship” two years ago. Today, Jolly Pumpkin is ready to announce that on New Year’s Eve, it will release its own Lambic-style beer, first brewed a little over four years ago, in bottles at the pub in Ann Arbor.

Lambicus Dexterius is a play on both the beer style and the home of the brewery in Dexter. Those around the brewery sometimes refer to the project as the “Dexter Lambic” or the “Dexter Funk.” This is the first of several Lambic-style beers that Jolly Pumpkin will release over the coming years. If the beers cooperate, the plan is for there to be at least one batch released each year.

Like “Allagash Spontaneous,” Jolly Pumpkin is brewing these beers in the same way as those in Belgium: with the wort cooling in an open fermentation vessel for one day while it picks up natural yeasts from the environment, without innoculation of any brewer’s yeast, before being racked into barrels for primary fermentation. Both beers feature 100% spontaneously fermentation. In April of last year, Jolly Pumpkin Founder and Brewmaster, Ron Jeffries, gave a few more specifics about the project, which first began in October 2005, on the ProBrewer forum. “At this point we are keeping things as traditional as possible. Turbid mash with a large percentage of raw wheat, extended boil with aged hops, using one of our open fermenters as a coolship, and racking into our most sour barrels the next day. No culture wild yeast, just what has shown up here over the years.”

Back to Lambicus Dexterius, it debuted at the Festival of Barrel-Aged Beer in Chicago in November. This one is a blend of the brewery’s first batch from over four years ago, a 3.5 year-old batch, and a 2.5 year-old batch. One lucky rater, rbCharlesDarwin, (and potentially more) actually got his hands on a sample bottle and posted up a pic of the beer on Flickr (interesting color).

He and some others describe it as low in carbonation and high in acidity in their reviews on RateBeer. That is intentional as this is a “still lambic,” which means there was no additional conditioning after initial fermentation. The result is a beer with very little carbon dioxide.

Less than 70 cases of the beer were bottled in 750’s in March. An extremely limited number of bottles will first be made available to the public on New Year’s Eve at the Ann Arbor pub. No more than 60 cases or so will hit distribution in early 2010 with most of it will be available in Michigan. There is optimism that some cases will be shipped to other states within JP’s distribution market though this part of the process is still in the works.

Remarkably, the man at the helm of some of the most experimental projects in brewing, Jeffries, said in an interview with Madison Beer Review a while back that he didn’t even start as a homebrewer or receive a formal brewing education. Rather, he began studying brewing science on his own while managing multiple jobs and pursuing a graduate school education. That said, he was fortunate to be able to incorporate some of that brewing science into his degree.

Regardless of how he got there, people seem to be very pleased with his work at Jolly Pumpkin thus far and this is sure to be one of the most highly sought-after releases of the coming year. He has to be pretty excited about his project being freed into the wild.