Two Metre Tall Farmhouse Ales & Ciders

who – Ashley + Jane Huntington (owners/brewers)

where – Derwent Valley, Southern Tasmania

vineyards/fields/orchards – organically farmed

brewing/winemaking – preservative free, mixed/wild ferments

labor practices – from Ashley: We do it all ourselves, everything from farming to brewing; Jane & I principally & our two girls to help (if they're home!). We have no employees. Australia works on an award wage system, so categories of work have a stipulated minimum wage. The Australian minimum wage standards are, unlike my impression of the US, very adequate indeed. If we need additional pickers (ie, we have arranged for pickers to harvest cherries from a neighbours farm) we will again pay to award rates and use labour experienced in & knowledgeable of these tasks.

Whilst we grow an (increasing) proportion of the ingredients we use and only purchase our fruit, grain & hops in Tasmania we do have other inputs (bottles, labels, caps) from a wide range of suppliers, including some international. Whilst this can be difficult (particularly for the large volume inorganic inputs such as bottles etc where the concept of sourcing from small artisan producers is effectively nil) we make it our business to be as aware of the businesses we deal with as is practically possible, not only with respect to the quality of the goods they sell to us but we also take an active interest in who they are and how they go about their business, including, in so far as we are able, their supply chains. Whilst this can be a rather subjective call, we always approach our trade with other companies consciously aligned with our core values; the quest for flavour, sustainability and truth of origin in the food we grow and make.

Agricultural workplaces, unfortunately, have history in exploitative behaviour with respect to workers. I guess the combined forces of remote workplaces, high seasonal demand for labour and the sheer number & diversity of individual businesses make things more challenging for authorities to regulate & police. (We) believe that whilst agricultural work can be hard & demanding it should also be safe, ethical and fairly remunerated and, following that fine country tradition of news travelling "along the grapevine", the best way to "audit" your suppliers is to know them personally. If our bespoke, handmade products are like our children, then our suppliers are like our extended family. And, extending this metaphor, this family connection provides the best insurance against the risk of the "bad apple" being harvested and entering the ingredient pool of our beloved products.

on the question of native yeast - from Ashley: There is a fundamental difference between wine & beer when it comes to fermentation.  Wine is made from fermenting grape sugars, which are >99.9% simple sugars (glucose, fructose) all of which are fermentable by saccharomyces cerevisiae.  The very valid observation in natural winemaking is that the addition of any cultured yeasts will result in colonisation of the fermentation space by these very powerful, very dominant isolated, cultured fermentation machines (and believe me, in this modern age they are extreme machines!) thereby prohibiting the ability of wild organisms to flourish.  Beer on the other hand is only around 70% simple sugars (maltose mainly) - and in our case probably around 60% - because brewers have to"produce" sugar from grain starches (the "brewing" process), which is inherently inefficient and leaves a very significant proportion of long-chain starch breakdown residues which are not fermentable by saccharomyces species.  Without writing a book on the subject here, this brings brettanomyces, lactobacillus, pediococcus & innumerable other species into play in breweries as these critters have a capacity to ferment the longer chain starch residues which saccharomyces cannot.  This thereby limits the ability of a particular "selected" (often referred to as "house" strain) saccharomyces to dominate a brewing locale in the same way it would in a winery.  This is why brewers on the whole are so critically & permanently concerned with maintaining absolutely sterile production facilities - which I call aseptic brewing - whereas wineries are much more comfortable operating open-air facilities & open tank fermentations.

As a winemaker who decided to brew upon returning home to Tasmania way back in 2004, I stumbled into this by accident because I simply started brewing beer in the same way I had made wine.  The naturally occurring microbiome of my site operated on my ales in a way that I did not intend and in a way that the brewing fraternity did not respect and produced flavours the market did not want.  All this - what I refer to as the stiff headwind of innovation - and I was actually not trying to make "wild" beer at all.  I was using brewers yeast and yet the results were anything but consistent and the flavours were anything & everything EXCEPT that attributable to the yeast I was adding.

Instead of "fixing" my problem (in the uber critical & outrageously vocal voices of the brewing cognoscenti - which, rather inexplicably, still hasn't completely subsided to this day I might add!) I fell in love with this complexity; this remarkable 3+ year process of ever-changing fermentation which started with THE most microbiologically unstable substrate - brewer's wort - and, if allowed to run its course without interference, finished with an almighty complex, acidified liquid 3-years later that had all the structural complexities which enable certain wines to age indefinitely but at one third of the alcohol content.

What I also realised - through those painful years of exploration into what-on-earth was happening to the beer I was trying to make - is that by using a neutral primary fermentation yeast I could knock-out the most volatile & worst (smelling & tasting) period of this three-year-process and make & sell a beer early in its life that still went through ALL of the complex transformations wrought by the indigenous microbiome of my site overtime.  Arguably, a slightly less complex ale initially, but in a market which understood none of what I was trying to sell anyway, these subtle nuances paled by comparison to the confrontational flavours & textures & ever-changing products I have been foisting on the marketplace since I started this foolhardy obsession 16 years ago!

I also discovered that the use of a primary fermentation yeast DID NOT impede or influence my 100% spontaneously initiated fermentations (which still took ages to start, years to complete and showed themselves to be very different in character to those ferments inoculated for quicker release).  Therefore, this added yeast WAS NOT "taking over" my site.

I would hazard a bet that we are still alone in brewing in this way.

And I get VERY hot under the collar about the new wave of brewers calling themselves as "wild" fermenters when so very few of them are doing anything of the sort!  Because they are brewers (remember, trained in sterility) they do not believe in what I do, ie "letting-it-go".  It's a fundamental philosophical difference we have; I have unlearned my training to intervene, they are still interventionist brewers trying to accommodate a "trend".  The result of this is the vast majority of the supposed brewers of "wild" beers that now exist are adding cultured yeast inoculums into sterile environments.  Now whilst this can be fascinating, it is NOT wild.  Not by any means.  Even if the culture is isolated from wildflowers in the native environment, once you remove it from its natural environment, isolate it, culture it and add it to sterile wort to the permanent exclusion of all others, then it is brewing just as it always has been performed with nothing more than a pretty story added.

The added yeast does not preclude a wild fermentation.  This is us.  However, the culturing & addition of yeasts from wild sources to the preclusion of all else is not wild fermentation.  This is the vast majority who use this term.

It is a very strange experience to go through all the commercial hard work & trauma to explore something from first principles - there was no such thing as a wild fermented beer in our marketplace until we came along - only to watch your persistence in messaging succeed to a point whereby you have created interest & market presence for a genuine point of difference which attracts other producers who are interested in the message only and not the technique. 

Are you still reading?

So, Tas Wild Ale, our four Tas River Series Ales (Derwent, Forester, Forth, Huon) are all products of genuinely "wild" fermentation that are started with the use of a neutral primary fermentation yeast.  These ales are also re-primed & re-fermented in bottle using a secondary fermentation yeast.  Both yeast additions are identical in all cases; they are the most neutral I can find.  None of these yeast additions influence the character, aroma, texture and flavour of any of these products, which is utterly verifiable by tasting them all side-by-side and then, tasting them all longitudinally (iesubsequent brew dates of the same product) where you will see significant batch-to-batch variation and well as variations in the same batch over time.

Our cider is 100% wild fermentation for 2-years.  We use no primary yeast.  BUT, because after two years it is completely bone dry & matured, we do re-prime & use a secondary ferment to bottle condition.

Special release ales, likewise, are invariably products of spontaneous fermentation and, again, due to age at bottling, have traditionally been re-primed and bottled with a secondary fermentation yeast. 

Yes, it is a VERY complex tale.  Completely at odds with the modern marketing strategies of "dumbing" things down for "consumer appeal".  A great sadness for me presently is watching commercial brewers conflate "wild", "sour" and "farmhouse", lumping them all into the same basket - tied up with the "beers-which-taste-different" ribbon - when all three concepts are completely different, even though they may have points of mutual overlap.  It was this disappointment which led me away from Shelton Bros.  I came away from The Festival in Denver in 2018 - the world's largest festival encapsulating this niche sector of the beer industry - having seen so many farmhouse ales but struggled to meet many actual farmers!  That is the definition of disillusionment!!  I despaired at the dilution of the term "wild"; a term so evocative, so engaging, so ... well, so simply irresistible to use ... (but just tell the story man, wave your hands, but FUCK, do not even think about it as a technique otherwise you’ll get yourself into all sorts of problems; problems of repeatability, problems of consistency, problems of super-fermentation, problems of unusual sensory characteristics ... yeah, just a shed load of problems.  Just tell the story man ...!)

OK.

Having said all that ...

2020 & 2021 are significant years in the evolution of the TwoMetreTall story.  From the start of 2020, during the period of isolation following the initial bombshell of the pandemic, we set ourselves the target of converting to "added yeast free".  Given what I have written above, this seems like a simple enough progression.  It is not.  It is an enormous change.  But one we had already been preparing for several years.  The challenge is that organoleptically challenging & extremely unstable early stage (the first year basically) of a spontaneous fermentation.  The idea of TWA, the River Series etc was an early release, less expensive example of what we did.  It is this business which pays for us to be able to hold things for 3, 4, & more years.  But we had to do it in a way that did not compromise who we are & what we believe in.  The answer is using a "solera system".  Since 2019, therefore, we have been building stocks of these "core range" beers as spontaneously fermented products and in late winter this year, we will draw off the very first commercial volumes to bottle.  This volume will then be blended with active "spontaneous fermentation" ales for bottle fermentation.  Spontaneously fermented.  Spontaneously bottle conditioned.  Everything.  They will need to spend a minimum of 3-months in bottle (probably longer) prior to release.  I am sure you can easily follow, even at our relatively small volumes, the cost, the time, the stock, the work involved in bringing this to fruition.  I have spent the last year or more thinking I am getting old & slow so behind do I appear to be against my schedule ... then I remember that I have effectively more than doubled my workload in this period to accommodate BOTH the present AND the future!  I am still getting old ...

Our Mead is the very first release of this process.  Three-year-old spontaneously fermented honey spontaneously fermented in bottle.  It's a kind of magic!

First the Mead (check!), the trials (check!), then we start bottling the 2019 cider when the 2021 apple juice is delivered & fermenting.  Then all the ales ... one-by-one ...

It is a very busy, very challenging, (very expensive!) and VERY exciting time in our project.

more info –
web: 2mt.com.au
instagram: @Twometretall