Brewbound 2024 Awards - New Product of the Year - Fonio Rising Pale Ale by Brooklyn Brewery

Speaker 1 [00:05] Well, many folks are looking into various spaces outside of beer for their next innovation, Brooklyn Brewery brewmaster Garrett Oliver is going old school, 5000 years ago, old school, and making sure you can still make new things in beer. And so that is why our uh new product of the year is going to be Brooklyn Brewery's Fonio Rising. It's the latest release from Brooklyn Brewery that is using this Fonio. It is a climate resistant super grain, and it is bringing new fun, exciting things to beer. So here to talk about it is Garrett Oliver himself. Welcome, Garrett. Hi,

Speaker 2 [00:44] how are you? This is awesome.

Speaker 1 [00:46] Good. Yeah, this is really exciting. I I, uh, first heard about Fonio through, I think some folks at Whole Foods who were bringing up like, this is, this is really cool, like, the people are doing things that are speaking to sustainability and also speaking to connecting with, you know, the roots of beer itself, which is in Africa, and the, the origins of beer that we tend not to think about. We think of it as very European based, and so there's a lot of really interesting dynamics going on here with Fonio. Give us the spiel. What, what, what is this? What, what is fonio?

Speaker 2 [01:24] Well, I think you can kind of think of it this way. If you go to an American or European supermarket and you buy a banana. You're going to get one kind of banana. It's called the Cavendish. In the old days it was the Gros Michell, and then the gro Michel got a disease, and we ended up with the Cavendish, the one banana. If you go to a market in Sao Paulo, Brazil, you will see 40 or 50 kinds of bananas, and that's kind of the way we've been living our lives in the brewing world when it comes to grain. There are many, many, many grains, hundreds, thousands of grains out there in the world, and most of us know maybe 10. And so when the chef, the Senegalese chef, Pierre Tm, uh, told me at Questlove's house, believe it or not, uh, at a party at Questlove's house, told me about Fonio and told me that it had grown for 5000 years in Western Africa. It grew in a hell where there was almost no rain. And it required no fertilizer, no pesticide, no fungicide, no insecticide, no tilling, no irrigation, nothing, and would reliably grow a crop despite it might be raining only 3 or 4 times in a year. I did not think this could possibly be true. Um, and then I looked it up and I watched his TED Talk and it turns out that it is true. And in that part of Africa there's 700,000 tons a year produced of fonio, but one of the reasons why we haven't heard of it up until about now, and people like Whole Foods have been big supporters, is that up until now it's required a lot. Manual labor to separate that seed away from its husk and then to rinse away any sand that might be in it, etc. What we would think of as modern grain milling and cleaning, etc. had not been applied to this ancient grain because it was just a local foodstuff. Now in this project we're seeing what a wonderful grain fonio is for brewing, and it's been used for brewing for thousands of years, but we're just not familiar with it. So when fermented, and we usually use it at 15 or 20%, as is the case for Fonio rising pale ale, it gives you this kind of Grit remier, lychee fruit, tropical Sauvignon Blanc, slightly wine aromatic that people just go nuts for, and we're all talking. Abouthiols and all these flavors that we want to get out of our hop signatures or our fermentation signatures in beer, and it turns out that Fonio is able to give us wonderful, wonderful flavors and at the same time we're using a grain that doesn't use all this nitrate fertilizer and doesn't need all of these chemicals. On top of that, not only are we resisting climate change, but many scientists believe that supporting rains like this are going to help slow not only climate change, but the desertification of the Sahara. So the Sahara is moving south and by planting along that edge we're going to be able to Help stop it and support thousands of smallhold African farmers at the same time. So Fonio kind of sounds too good to be true, but I, uh, I believe, I know, but I will encourage people to look it up, do your own reading, and you will come to the conclusion that this actually is a super grain.

Speaker 1 [04:54] Reading up about it, it has like positive impact on the soil that it's in, like there's, it's so you just keep going and there's more and more positive things. And

Speaker 2 [05:03] you're like, well, why didn't anybody tell us about it? It's like, well, right, you, you have, you know, companies that are out there feeding the whole country and they have. A way of doing things and they have these 6 or 8 grains that they're going to use, but these are not the only things that are available. And then when it turned out, the thing is if Fonio didn't taste good in beer, it kind of wouldn't matter, right? It's like it could be a super grain, so to speak, but it has to taste good. The fact of the matter is though, that beer made with Fonio to me tastes better than beer made without Fonio. That's the important part. It actually adds wonderful flavors that we like. So in the case of our fio pale ale, we're able to use about half the hops that you might normally expect to get that intensity of fruity kind of flavor and aroma, even though our yeast strain is not all that fruity in the first place. And as a result, we can have a really sort of normal price for things and be able to bring people a really delicious beer with an ingredient that they can really feel good about and support.

Speaker 1 [06:11] What has it been like, you've done a few beers now with this, just experimenting with that, and what is it? I mean, that has to be exciting of the opportunities of just a whole new resource to use,

Speaker 2 [06:23] right? It's super exciting. I mean, look, I've been brewing for 35 years. Uh, I can tell you straight up, I have never in my entire My entire career seeing any single subject that has excited people as much asphonio, period. And I'm a geek, right? So I love all kinds of malts and you have a new, an old variety of malt and you have a new hot variety, etc. I'm all over it. But when you ask regular people, hey, what do you think of this, and you tell them about Ponio. They want to know more. Everybody wants to know more. I've never seen anything like that before. This resonates, especially with younger people who have to spend the next, you know, 60 years, 70 years on this planet and want to take care of both the Earth and the people on it. And so I think that Fo is greatly resonant. And we've had an opportunity through our Brewing for Impact program to work with a wide variety of partners, brewing collaborations to help bring Fono even deeper into the brewing industry.

Speaker 1 [07:28] Yeah, you mentioned that Brewing for Impact program. You have heavy names on there. I mean, Guinness is involved, Carlsberg is involved, Russian River was involved. Vinny was really excited talking about it at GABF this year. Um, what is, uh, the vision for that moving forward? Do you see this being more people participating in that in these collaborations? Do you see Fonio being something that's just part of folks' repertoire going forward? What, what does that look like? I think

Speaker 2 [07:55] it will be. Uh, yes, Carlsberg, Guinness, I mean, the Guinness, you know, Fono Stout launch parties have been crazy, so much fun, you know, and the African diasporic community coming out for those, so you know. Those parties are popping off. The Omnipoyo party in Stockholm in Sweden. Always great to work with Vinny. We've worked together before. I know Vinny plans to keep brewing with Fonio. Carlsberg making 100% Fonio beer and finding out that it tastes like sake and champagne. Like they're really excited about what they're going to be able to do with it. Maison Colau, you know, in Dakar in Senegal, who are out there selling a Fonio beer. As their, you know, number one beer in their portfolio, so we've had a lot of inquiries to the to the point where I have an FAQ that I send to people, and now R BSG are going to be carrying Fonio as a regular product that you can just go buy when you're buying your malt and your hops in the first place, and that's a big deal because it puts Fonio right there, you know, in the center of brewing ingredients, which is going to be very, very easy for people to simply order.

Speaker 1 [09:06] That's very exciting. What, how about for yourself and for Brooklyn, how do you see Fonio working for your future there?

Speaker 2 [09:14] I think fonio is a big part of our connection to wider communities. I mean, yes, beer does have a European background, but it also has this background, you know, beer comes from all over the world. It comes out of Africa and went everywhere, and everybody has their own brewing traditions. So in connecting beer back to other places. in the world, we also collect, you know, we connect a diverse US population with the overall beer culture, and I think that's increasingly important. I mean, we are seeing a lot of other perfectly good beverages eat our lunch on a day to day basis, the wine people and the cocktail people and the sake. Everybody's doing a great job and we're doing a great job too. But we've been a little bit too narrow, maybe, and here's an opportunity to do something that's going to make great, great beer, do great things for community, do great things for the planet, but then also just sort of speak to people where they live, and give them something new to talk about. It's, it's really good stuff, you know, and it has basically no downsides.

Speaker 1 [10:24] We love something with no downside, right? I

Speaker 2 [10:27] mean, like, look, agriculture is, you know, is, is a difficult business, you know, and it does usually require a lot of inputs. We don't tend to ask that many questions about where all of our grain comes from and how it gets grown, etc. etc. but you start looking into it like, uh, you know, it's a little bit tough. Like, you know, everything that we eat every day, most of the time, uh, all fonio is functionally organic. You know, so whether it's certified or not, it's all functionally organic. It's never had these chemicals applied to it, and it doesn't need it. It wouldn't actually help. So this is a grain that grows essentially in a desert because that's where it's from, and we're told that this is non-arable land, but actually it is arable land just under a particular crop that we haven't been familiar with.

Speaker 1 [11:14] It's really exciting, the, the opportunities that are out there with this product, and I'm excited to try some of these beers too that have come out. I mean, you really are hyping up the, the flavor possibilities with it are just super exciting.

Speaker 2 [11:28] Well, I'm glad to say that it's not flavor possibilities, it's flavor realities, and that's what I like, I like flavor realities better than possibilities.

Speaker 1 [11:36] Well, the flavor realities have created this, the beer that is coming from you guys, our new product of the year, this is Brooklyn Brewery's phony uprising. Really, really excited to, to see what else comes out with this. So thank you again for, for chatting about

Speaker 2 [11:51] it. Well, thank you, and we're very, very honored. This is, uh, this is huge. Thank you.