- Transient founder Chris Betts with some of the barrels in which his beers acquire their special qualities
As much as it must suck to make beer that nobody cares about, making beer that rivets the attention of bottle-trading nerds comes with its own aggravations. Count yourself lucky if you’ve never seen a full-grown man whining like a spoiled child in an attempt to guilt a brewer or shop manager into parting with a small-batch bottle that’s reserved for someone else.
Betts specializes in what he calls “modern farmhouse ales,” which get much of their character—usually a little sour and funky, to use the most generic possible terms—from the traditional but almost extinct practice of barrel fermentation. That is, he ferments his beers in used wooden barrels rather than stainless-steel vessels, and because he can’t sterilize the wood, the unique colony of wild microscopic beasties inhabiting each barrel contributes a distinctive flavor. (Barrel aging, like what Goose Island does to its Bourbon County stouts, happens after fermentation.) If you’ve had anything from Side Project in Saint Louis or Jester King outside Austin, you probably already know (in a broad sense) what barrel-fermented beer tastes like.
- How classy is Beer and Metal? I photographed Transient’s Salarium gose on a forklift pallet.
Salarium is 4 percent alcohol and uses a nontraditional saison yeast along with lactobacillus, the customary souring agent. Betts also left out the usual coriander, though he kept the salt (otherwise it wouldn’t feel like a gose). The grain bill is mostly wheat and barley, with a bit of oats and aromatic malt; a small dose of clean noble hops provides balance without announcing itself. Transient released the only previous batch of Salarium late last summer, but this one is better timed for warm weather. When it hits the market again in mid- to late June, it’ll go for seven or eight bucks for a 500-milliliter bottle.
- Any similarity to the artwork in Where the Wild Things Are is entirely intentional.
I didn’t want to write about Transient without reviewing a barrel-fermented beer, so I asked Betts for a bottle of Brutus, a sour spelt saison brewed in collaboration with Fountainhead chef Cleetus Friedman. (It’s available in 500-milliliter bottles for $13.99 at Fountainhead’s new market.) Despite its burly name, Brutus is a perfectly reasonable 6.4 percent alcohol; it smells of apricot, white wine, vanilla, caramel, wet hay, and leather. After that mellow aroma, though, it hits your tongue startlingly tart, with a juicy acidity like underripe peach and pineapple.
- Labels for Cherry Pentameter and Apricot Ardent
Transient plans to increase the size of its subscription membership in six months or so, when some of the bigger batches enabled by the move to Aquanaut are finally ready to drink. Betts thinks he can probably double production in the new space. Right now he has 12 four-barrel puncheons (in this case a “barrel” is about 31 gallons), four bourbon barrels filled with Buckley, and 26 mixed barrels (whiskey, wine, or apple brandy) for sours and farmhouse ales. The whiskey and apple-brandy barrels are 53 gallons, while the wine are 60. Many have yet to leave One Trick Pony.
I realize I’m making these beers sound prohibitively difficult to buy, but Transient does have several regular retail accounts, including not just the Beer Temple but also Capones, Moreno’s Liquors, the Beer Cellar in Glen Ellyn, and the Armanetti’s at Grand and Western (where the beer buyer is a member). You can also drink Transient beers on draft pretty reliably at the Bad Apple, the Green Lady, the Village Tap, and Links Taproom.
