For any creative person, I believe, physical separation can be a force for good. Think of the writer who secludes himself to finish a work, the academic who goes on sabbatical to conduct her own research, or the artist who takes up residence in a foreign land. Distancing ourselves from the influence of others and making time for some serious navel-gazing has, at least in my experience, been incredibly freeing.
I can’t claim to have done this on purpose or with any sort of foresight—this story is more one of happenstance. I’m a Texas-born boy who fell in love with Sydney, the rugged bushland, and an Australian partner, and then never left. As someone who loves to make things from scratch—and following dalliances with astrophysics, sourdough baking, and bespoke shoemaking—I fell into Australia’s nascent craft brewing in 2013.
However, amid the arms races of hops, IBUs, ABV, barrel-aging, and adjuncts, I began to feel that I was doing too much looking around for inspiration. Instead, I wanted to explore the possibilities of developing beers from the ground up—ingredients, yeast, equipment—instead of a top-down approach focused on importing hops, yeast, kit, and ideas from other parts of the world.
In 2016, influenced by the natural wine movement and farmhouse brewing, we started making beers fermented with foraged, native yeasts and bacteria in our little place under the flight path in Marrickville, an Inner West suburb of Sydney that bears a certain resemblance to places such as Brooklyn and Bermondsey. We’ve honed our focus over the years, but since opening, I’ve aimed to make beers that carry the fingerprint of the place in which they’re made—starting with our house culture.
A Culture in Bloom
We’re functionally called Wildflower because that’s the origin of this endeavor: We ferment our beers with a mixed culture of yeast and bacteria that’s been harvested, wrangled, and foraged from native Australian flowers such as the golden wattle (Acacia pycnantha) and Grevillea (commonly known as spider flower).
It began as an impetus to make something I could proudly carry in my bag to other people—producers around the world—to demonstrate that this beer, what we made, was from Australia. And we’ve continued to sharpen that focus over time using both the ingredients themselves and the way we work with them in-house.
In 2019, after a conversation with James Erskine of Jauma wines in the Adelaide Hills—and with the assistance of Voyager Craft Malt, about six hours west of us—we sowed a crop of heritage barley in the organic, carbon-sequestering, living soils of the Greenwood family farm. Since that first batch, harvested and malted in early 2020, we have made our beers with only those grains.
The following year, a pectinatus infection in our house culture led us to develop a new one that was devoid of any lab-propagated yeast or bacteria—such as the saison Saccharomyces strain associated with Brasserie Dupont, which was previously resident in our culture.
Together, those two adjustments—local malt and a wholly native mixed culture—ushered in a more developed focus. We were not simply making beers from a place but making drinks that served to nourish and satisfy, developing an originality while acting in opposition to a consumptive approach.
Homegrown Beer for the Table
Our table beer is likely the best example of that approach. After two years of this 2.9 percent ABV ale being our first kegs to kick at the Firestone Walker Invitational, I have to ponder why a beer like this resonates.
There are a few defining features, and any one of those could be the thing that stands out for any given punter—the low ABV, the bitterness, the limey-Motueka hit, the high carbonation. More and more, however, I suspect it has something to do with the warmth, the texture, and the way your body reacts to it rather than how it makes your body feel. Like biting into a homegrown tomato, there are just certain receptors that go off in your brain when you know something is good.
I can tell when this recipe is right by the reaction of a previously unaware or unconvinced customer—the way their furrowed brow relaxes and their shoulders drop as they allow this beer to satisfy. It’s interesting, too, because it doesn’t take much to make—the recipe is so simple. Yet like a table loaf or a table wine, this is a type of beer made from high-quality local ingredients in repeatable methods designed for everyday (yet moderate) consumption. Table beer is not to be pedestaled, fussed over, or over-consumed. Much like the inputs, you can make do with less.
With such a simple grist, the origins of your ingredients are paramount. We use our municipal Sydney water, which is relatively neutral but high in chlorine like many warmer-climate cities. To combat this, we boil our strike and sparge liquor the day before, allowing it to precipitate out overnight. Instead of a false bottom, we filter the wort through a lattice of wheat straw—a subtle difference that, in our opinion, adds to the Wildflower warmth. We hop with organic, whole-cone Motueka, from first wort to a generous whirlpool addition. There are no salts or process aids in our recipe.
A note on our yeast: We view our house culture as a clean culture that just so happens to have a bunch of bacteria and Brett in it. We pitch the combined culture as one, rather than inoculating in stages, to encourage competition between the sprinters—sugar-loving Saccharomyces—and the mid- to long-distance runners, intentionally suppressing the uptake of the latter for the former.
Essentially, we brew our Organic Table Beer as cleanly as we can while working with what we’ve got—so make your mash sugars available, hop generously, and ferment hot and fast.