Wunderkammer -- Dorsal View -- Feb 2025

Dorsal View, 5.5%
Mixed culture beer brewed with Chicory and finished on whole roasted cacao beans (Prophecy Chocolate)

One I wanted to talk about is Dorsal View. Brewed in the summer of 2023. As has been the start of a distressing pattern here, we have been getting intense periods of rain and floods here in the summer. The ground gets super saturated with water and if heavier down pour hits, disaster strikes. One very small upside is, with the earth loosened up, it is easy to pick chicory roots. I picked and dried, roasted and ground up some chicory that grows all around the cave. It loves sandy, hard packed soils and has charming beautiful purple-blue flowers. It has been historically used as a coffee substitute or additive because it shares a dark appearance and bitterness on the pallet, but the roast quality quite rounded. You can definitely tell, in a high concentration, that it is a roasted root and shares more similarity with ginger or or ginseng or parsnips than a roasted bean like coffee or seed like barley. In this beer, it works in concert with the roasted barley to create a beautiful dark amber base.

After a year in barrel, I moved it on to fresh roasted whole cacao beans that were selected, imported and prepared by Mateo of Prophecy Chocolate, right here in Hardwick, Vermont. Mateo has spent several years learning and working with farmers in Peru, where he sources his beans as well as developing various cacao based products. When I spoke with him about the project, talked about my brewing and the beer I’d made, he had just the thing. After a month of contact time with these freshly roasted beans, the result was a beer that in some ways remind me of the Flemish styles of red and brown sour ales, but with the typical restraint towards the acidity of those styles, as well as an absence of the harsher acidic aromas and flavors. It starts out with a combination of roast and sour character of a very dark chocolate and resolves in a rounded roasted malt character. All while maintaining an overall dryness of a well attenuated mixed culture beer. I made this beer with Valentine’s Day in mind, but frankly this is a fine beer to drink any time of year.

The art is from a painting of a back view, that is, dorsal view, of a heart.