(Fort Collins, CO) – Another chapter in our interview series featuring the projects at Odell Brewing…

The next beer to be released in the Single Serve Series is Odell Friek. This one has seen some very limited time on tap thus far but will be made available for the first time in bottles this winter. Here’s what Odell brewer, Joe Mohrfeld, had to say about the beer.

What was the impetus for the exploration of this beer?

Friek has been an ongoing experimentation into the world of Belgian-inspired sour ales. Blending characteristics of a Kriek with those of a Framboise, it is an evolution, an imaginative amalgamation, invented by our brewers.

The thought process for the project began five years ago and we brewed the first micro-pilot 10 gallon batch of Kriek 3.5 years ago using colorado cherries on a modified homebrew system. We felt that raspberries when added fresh would complement the lactic sourness and play off the rich pie-like characteristics of the cherries to provide more depth and complexity to this beer.

Our upcoming release of Friek differs very little from this initial batch, except for the increased volume we made so that this time we could share it with people outside of the brewery.

When were the batches for this first brewed and when were the cherries added? What yeasts are you using?

This current batch of Friek started with a Belgian Lambic-inspired base beer, the first of which was brewed just over three years ago. We brewed a number of pilot batches over the past three years, adding cherries to them during and right after fermentation prior to the barrel aging process. These older batches were later blended into a larger 50bbl brew that we did over a year ago. To this new batch, we added 3,000 lbs of organic whole sweet cherries and 1,000 lbs of organic whole tart cherries from Big B’s Delicious Orchards in Paonia, CO.

We are using a variety of wild yeasts in this beer, including our two house Brettanomyces strains from Saboteur and Deconstruction, as well as bacteria in the barrel aging process to achieve an appropriate amount of brett-funkiness and acidic sourness.

When were the raspberries added? What did you learn from the pilot batches that told you to start with the kriek and then add raspberries in the latter stages?

This past fall, during the raspberry harvest we once again hand picked organic raspberries with our friends at Schroyer Farms and have added them to our final blend right before bottling. By adding them late in the process, we preserve the bright tartness of the raspberry and compliment the richer cherry characteristics that have developed during the aging process. This process does make the ratio of cherries to raspberries pretty disproportionate to favoring cherries, but throughout numerous pilot brews and blends we are extremely happy with this blending technique and believe that it provides a great representation of each fruit in the final blend.

When will this be released? I’m assuming same format of 750s & draft as the other Single Serves.

We will be releasing Friek, 6.5% abv, in mid-February (pending label approval) in Belgian-Style 750ml Cork and Cage bottles and it will see very limited draft in our nine-state distribution region (CO, AZ, NM, WY, MN, MO, SD, KS, NE).