Prairie Artisan Ales / Jester King "Coolship Roadtrip"

March 9, 2016

We wrapped up our winter 2015-2016 coolship season with some fun “mobile projects”. The idea behind these projects was to spontaneously ferment beer with microorganisms native to other geographical areas, thereby achieving some interesting and enjoyable results with a sense of place beyond our brewery. For one of these mobile projects, we teamed up with our friends at Prairie Artisan Ales for what we’ve affectionately dubbed “Coolship Roadtrip”.

Coolship Roadtrip involved brewing wort at Jester King, inoculating it in our coolship with native yeast and bacteria, driving the wort to Prairie for fermentation in their oak barrels, then repeating the process in reverse by brewing at Prairie, inoculating wort in their coolship, and driving it to Jester King for fermentation in our oak barrels. We’re very excited to now have wort brewed at Prairie and inoculated with their native microorganisms busily fermenting in our barrel room!

Coolship Roadtrip is a good example of the type of collaboration we like to engage in. That is, one where we’re using native ingredients from another brewery to make beer with a sense of place. We expect Coolship Roadtrip to slowly ferment spontaneously at our respective breweries for quite some time (likely years) prior to release. If the results are encouraging (or even if they’re not!), we’ll plan on doing another Coolship Roadtrip in 2017. For now, here are some photos from our Coolship Roadtrip with Prairie!