When Chad Yakobson launched Crooked Stave Artisan Beer Project (Denver, Colorado) in 2010, he was among the very first American brewers—after Ron Jeffries and his Jolly Pumpkin Artisan Ales—to build a brewery dedicated to barrel-aged wild and sour beers. He had several dozen barrels, wort that he’d contract brew off-site, and a whole lot of academic knowledge about the nature of the Brettanomyces yeast species and its behavior in pure-culture fermentation. And yet he had no set idea of what to expect from the project or whether his beers would be well received.
“I wanted to see, ‘okay, here’s the research on Brett, but is it applicable and do people want to buy Brett beers year-round?’ ” Yakobson says. “It was market research as much as it was R&D brewing research—take the principles of wild and sour beer, push the envelope, and see what the consumer wanted and whether we could make the yeast do what we wanted it to do.”
Yakobson was in his mid-twenties and had just completed a long and rigorous academic deep-dive into microbiology, fermentation science, and the nature of wild yeast, including post-graduate work studying winemaking in New Zealand and a master’s degree in brewing and distilling from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland. He was brimming with ideas and experiments to try and envisioned Crooked Stave Artisan Beer Project as a living laboratory to test the practical application and marketability of his research. His ambition was singular and lofty—whenever talk turned to wild and sour ales, Crooked Stave should be the first name on people’s lips.