Heirloom Rustic Ales brews its beers in a manner best described as deliberate. Another word for deliberate might be slow, which is also true of most of the open-fermented lagers and saisons that are the focus at this four-month-old brewery in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
But slow isn’t the goal—it just happens to be what makes the beers taste so good.
Cofounder Zach French’s reverence for the dry, green-bottle saisons of Belgium and Cofounder Jake Miller’s transformational time spent brewing at St. Somewhere Brewing Company in Tarpon Springs, Florida, convinced them of the absolute necessity of open fermentation at Heirloom—even when it required some last-minute tank reorders, and even when it means the beers demand patience.
“The way we brew it, to get something to attenuate, it’s not going to be a ten-day turn. Our saisons are twenty-five and thirty days minimum. But at the end of the day, it’s a wild, mixed-culture, open-fermented saison in a wine tank that’s bone dry and super effervescent,” Miller says. “That’s something we can stand behind.”
The process not only can produce unexpected hops aromas, esters, and barrel character, but it also has an Old World charm that pleases the team. (Their affection for traditional methods is evident in the name, Heirloom Rustic Ales.) Aside from saisons, open fermentation works magic on the brewery’s lagers, which have come to occupy a large chunk of the taproom’s twelve draft lines. Miller acknowledges all the great lagers already available in the world—with an especially passionate declaration of love for Heater Allen Brewing’s Pils—but says he wanted to do lagers his own way.