Wari: A Collaboration History
Collaboration has become commonplace in craft beer. Too often, collaboration brews are simply recipes either brewery could have come up with on their own and then are co-branded. A more interesting collaboration focuses on recipes that would not be able to exist without contributions from both breweries. For example, many of the collaboration beers we make require sharing house yeasts or other specific ingredients (like the Brettanomyces strain Allagash shared with us for Ghost Lemons, or the Miller High Life hop extract that went into Eeek!). But the most interesting collaborations require a meaningful sharing of ideas; all the better if those ideas come from outside of the brewing industry. The relationship between Off Color Brewing and Field Museum has provided a meaningful sharing of ideas and resulted in beers that otherwise would never have come to be.
Our relationship with The Field Museum goes back to 2013, when The Field Bistro opened inside the museum and they were looking to add a local house beer to their draft offerings. While we are immensely proud of Tooth & Claw (as well as the badass dinosaur we were licensed to showcase on the label), the beer classified more as the type of collaboration we could have just brewed on our own. We already knew how to make a killer pilsner, but we wanted our partnership with The Field Museum to go deeper than producing a house beer for them. When Megan Beckert, Director of Business Enterprises at The Field Museum who has been our point person since the beginning, asked us what other projects we had in mind to work on, we simply responded, “Sit us in a room with some scientists.” She delivered just that in April 2015 when she coordinated a meeting with Dr. Ryan Williams, Associate Curator and Professor of Anthropology.
Dr. Williams was excited to discuss his research excavating a civilization dating back to 600–1,000 AD in Cerro Baul, Peru which also happened to be home to one of the largest pre-Inca breweries discovered in the Americas. This brewery produced chicha de molle, or fermented maize beer, using sprouted corn kernels and Schinus molle berries, evidence of which were found on the grinding stones and in the incinerator of the ancient brewery.i He also discussed chicha morada, a variant of chicha made with Peruvian purple corn with a brilliant dark color. By the time the meeting was over, we had a wealth of knowledge for beginning our work on a new brew. Ultimately we landed on a developing a hybrid beer based on both the chicha de molle and chicha morada. Our first task was to make sure we could get our hands on all the ingredients to make a pilot batch, second task was to make sure S. molle berries were not poisonous, or something (spoiler, they are not).
After looking on Google for like 10 minutes, we found small lots of the Peruvian purple corn flour and also discovered that S. molle berries are a fancy name for pink peppercorns, which we could conveniently get directly from our spice provider. Our plan was to showcase the brilliant color from the purple corn as well as the unique spicy flavor from the S. molle berries. The base beer was made from only the purple corn and pilsner malt (The pilsner malt served the function of creating a clean base to showcase the other ingredients as well as to supply the enzymes to convert the starches in the dried corn to fermentable sugar). The brew was also spiced with the S. molle berries at the end of the boil. Since the chicha at Cerro Baul was fermented in ceramic vats in a room likely without a roof, we looked around the brewery and decided that the vessel most likely to give a flavor profile of a something fermented in corner was our lactic acid souring tanks. After mashing and boiling the chicha wort, we batch soured the wort with our house Lactobacillus strain to provide a clean acidity. It’s also notable to mention that the ceramic vats in Cerro Baul were not temperature controlled as air conditioning systems were not going to be invented for like ten more centuries. So we decided to pitch our farmhouse yeast, which provides excellent flavor at elevated temperatures, for the primary fermentation. The result was stunning, especially visually. The acidification process turned the dark purple wort to bright magenta beer. The spices perfectly balanced the grain profile and acidity brightened the entire flavor profile.
Five months later, we became annoyed with all the beer we put in kegs and never consumed, so we threw a party at the production facility and tapped a bunch of older and odd beer we had sitting in kegs. When we tapped the chicha, we had an “oh crap, we messed up and made this awesome, unique beer with an iconic Chicago institution and then forgot about it” moment. So, by November 2016, the project got moving again. We found a company to import a bulk supply of purple corn with the hope we’d be able to get the chicha brewed by the end of the year. A month later the corn was held up in customs, which pushed back the brew another month. The release got pushed back to early March 2016, nearly 11 months after the first planning meeting was set.
Wari chicha de molle inspired ale was launched at The Field Museum with a rousing, historically accurate talk by Dr. Williams and an awkward, semi-accurate talk by myself. One of the greatest compliments the beer received was from the group of graduate students who worked on excavating the sites in Peru and guests from the Anthropology Alliance Steering Committee. They said Wari tasted very similar to the chicha being small batch brewed by the locals in Peru. The collaboration and release was unlike any other we’ve done as we drank chicha, discussed history, viewed keros and other artifacts from the dig site, and munched on yummy appetizers overlooking Lake Michigan from The Field Bistro.
Looking back on this collaboration and reading though Dr. William’s research, I was left with one question, “Why did the Wari people burn their brewery to the ground?” His answer was simple, “The society collapsed.” At the end of the Wari civilization at Cerro Baul after the final batch of chicha was brewed, the settlement was abandoned and burned to the ground. Likely the last structure to go down in flames was the brewery as the elders drank the last of the chicha before smashing their most ornate kero drinking vessels into the ruins of the brewery site.iii Lets hope our brewery has a happier ending, but if not at least we will have an amazing after party.
For more information about Dr. Williams’s research, check out:
http://www.fieldmuseum.org/sites/default/files/pnas_pub.pdf
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/2019/04/beer-diplomacy-dying-days-wari-empire/
i Burning down the brewery: Establishing and evacuating an ancient imperial colony at Cerro Bau´ l, Peru Michael E. Moseley*, Donna J. Nash, Patrick Ryan Williams, Susan D. deFrance, Ana Miranda, and Mario Ruales, pg 17267 PNAS November 29, 2005 vol. 102 no. 48
iii Ibid. pg 17271
