Here on the Third Coast, we wrap ourselves in luxuriant layers of cheese to forge through the bitterly cold winters. Sometimes, there’s sausage. It’s about as much fun as you can have during the time of year when you’re flinging around handfuls of rock salt and defrosting pipes with upsetting intensity and frequency.
A year or so ago, we two industry friends—Jenny at Dovetail Brewery, John at Revolution Brewing—combined our loves of beer, cheese, winter, and hucksterism to host a one-day fondue-and-sausage popup at Dovetail. But BrewSKI wasn’t just any Midwestern Fondue Brigadoon—we tapped the knowledge of Dovetail’s cellar team to build a fondue entirely around the character of their lambic-style beers. We called it spondue because if there’s one thing we love more than cheese, it’s a good portmanteau.
Dovetail brews spontaneously fermented beers in the Senne Valley tradition. Twice a year, in the fall and in the spring, when the weather is not too hot and not too cold, they brew a beer made with pale malt, unmalted wheat, and aged hops. They deploy the Belgian method of turbid mashing before sending the wort to spend the night in a coolship before it’s pumped into oak barrels to mature for at least a year.