Is the Newark area the new Belgian beer capital of Delaware?

The beer tasted like plums — the ones in the icebox, so cold and delicious.

On Black Friday at Autumn Arch Beer Project's tasting room at 810 Pencader Drive near Newark, a beer called Hidden Staircase had spent months in barrels before finally arriving in the glass as a purple-black riot of tart stone fruit and patiently aged wine and maybe even some notes of hay.

Next to me, a patron couldn’t bring herself to order much else — nor could she believe a beer made five minutes from her New Castle County home could so nearly approximate the ancient beers brewed in the cellars and abbeys of Belgium.

But it’s worth believing. Pound for pound, one of the best little Belgian beer towns in the United States just might be … Newark, Delaware.

The area around the little city of 31,000 — best known perhaps for UD frat parties and Bob Marley’s first career on a Chrysler assembly line — has become a wee powerhouse for beers that taste like an alcoholic life lived on a Belgian farm. Wild beers. Sour beers. Beers that taste like wine or roses, and beers that taste like sun-ripe cherries.

Don’t take our word for it: Ask the oldest and historically largest competition in American beer.

Autumn Arch Beer Project and Musings Fermentation Underground, two tiny breweries with funny names and hardly any distribution, unknown to most people even in their home state, just got named among the best makers of Belgian-style beers in the country at the Great American Beer Festival this year.

Each winning beer, aging in wine barrels until it came into its full character, took more than a year to make.

And each was made just 500 yards from the other, on the same warehouse-filled stretch of Pencader Drive in the community of Glasgow near Newark. The brewers were so close they could walk over to borrow a cup of sugar if the need arrived.

“A lot of times, I’d just wander over to Autumn Arch to say hi,” said Musings head brewer Joe Jasper, whose bone-dry and hibiscus-infused Shadow Saison was named the best specialty saison in America this year.

“It is kind of fascinating,” said Autumn Arch co-founder Jimmy Vennard. His brewery’s traditional Flanders red, a style that tastes a bit like wine made from tart cherries and chocolate, was named the country’s best Belgian-style sour.  “We brewed very similar styles right down the street from each other, and both took top honors at the Great American Beer Festival.”

Thousands of brewers from all across America enter the competition each year, and a brewer might spend their whole career trying to win even a third-place nod. No brewer in New York, New Jersey or Maryland managed to score a gold medal this year.

Vennard could only shake his head that two Belgian-style beers made on the same Delaware street would be named best of their style in the country.

“Is something in the water here?” he wondered.

Musings is the only brewery exclusively devoted to wilds and sours in the First State

But though they ended up on the same little street, the two Newark-area breweries’ paths to making some of the best Belgian-style beers in America were very different.

Musings brewer Joe Jasper came to Delaware from Oregon, where he brewed at bicoastal beer powerhouse Deschutes Brewery, as well as at a wee brewery called Oakshire that’s best known for making wild and sour and interesting beers full of the flavors of fruit.

But his wife and Musings co-founder, Lindsay Naylor Jasper, got a job as a geography and food systems professor at the University of Delaware — and that took the pair across the country.

Slowly, while Joe brewed at other local breweries like Victory in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, the two hatched a plan: They’d start the first brewery in Delaware devoted exclusively to wild and sour ales.

They’d catch their brewing yeasts from the air by using a broad and open brewing pan called a coolship — in much the same process as proofing dough for a true sourdough bread — then age the beer for more than a year to let its deep flavors take hold.

This method is the oldest way to make beer, an ancient art subject to the seasons and the temperature. And because it depends on the free-floating yeasts in the air, a truly wild beer also tastes different depending on where you brew it.

If wine has terroir and oceanic oysters have merroir, a wild beer has … what? Aeroir? Musings’ beer is the taste of Delaware air. They brew only in the cool months of fall and winter, when the flavors are best.

“When the temperatures below 40 degrees at night, that’s when we brew … when it has the flavor profile that’s preferred,” Joe Jasper said.

But first, they had to change Delaware law.

Their small production window, and the tiny amount of beer they make, meant that it didn’t make financial sense to buy expensive brewing equipment and keep it all year.

Instead, they rent time on the equipment of other breweries for the first stages of the brewing process — a practice called itinerant brewing that may be familiar to fans of innovative breweries like Copenhagen's Mikkeller, or Fermentery Form and The Referend in Pennsylvania.

But Delaware law didn’t allow it, and so the Jaspers had to learn how to lobby: Finally, their representative, Newark’s Paul Baumbach, sponsored a bill in early 2021 that allowed brewers to share equipment.

Finally, Musings was off to the races.

They fermented a batch of wort — a grainy beer precursor — in an open vessel called coolship to gather the ambient flavors and yeasts of Delaware air. They also added a yeast found in a 19th-century barrel. Then, a barnyardy yeast balled Brettanomyces.

They aged the beer a year in Chardonnay barrels, and let it sit atop hibiscus flowers to soak up floral aromas.

The resulting beer was the hibiscus version of their Shadow Saison: bone dry but dulcetly floral, wild and delicately funky and maybe even a little strange. The flavors of the beer belong only to itself, and are unrepeatable. When they make the same beer next year, it will be different.

That hibiscus Shadow is one of only three beers Musings has for sale, alongside a Flanders red and the same Shadow saison without the flowers. The hibiscus version was the one named the best specialty saison in the country this year.

That said, for now, you’ll have to fight to find it. Musings is moving from its Glasgow location to another within the city of Newark, which means they don’t have a taproom. And until they have a permanent address again for their fermentation equipment, another obstreperous Delaware law means they can’t sell their beer in Delaware.

You have to buy your bottle in Pennsylvania — at shops like Lower Merion Beverage or Bryn Mawr Beverage in Montgomery County.

Some Delawareans already have made the trek.

“We have a lot of really excellent Delaware craft beer lovers,” Lindsay Naylor Jasper said.

Glasgow's Autumn Arch has a history of experimental beer

As for Autumn Arch, it turns out that gold-medal-winning Flanders Red was the very first barrel-aged sour made at Autumn Arch by brewer Justin Colatrella, who arrived in 2020 after logging 10 years at other Delaware breweries.

“For years, I've been fascinated about wanting to do a Flanders red,” he said. “But everywhere I worked, they didn’t want to bring in mixed media. Everyone was afraid.”

Turns out, the wild yeasts and bacteria that make Belgian beers so distinctive also are the bane of other brews. If you let Brettanomyces or other wild yeasts loose in your other brew tanks, it might make your pilsner sour, and your IPA taste like the inside of a barn. Breweries must devote specific brewing equipment only to wild beers.

But Autumn Arch was always devoted to the outer edges of flavor, ever since opening their brewery and tasting room in 2019. Alongside classic pale lagers and hazy IPAs, Arch is home to beer imbued with the lemon-piney taste of a Mexican spirit called sotol; peanut butter and jelly beers named after Jay-Z; steeply alcoholic barleywines and ancient recipes for Burton ale.

Its founders, all named Vennard, are all former engineers: This includes brothers Dan and Jimmy, and Jimmy’s wife, Kathryn.

Longtime homebrewers, the two brothers devoted Autumn Arch to small-batch and experimental flavors, the wild and weird and barrel-aged stuff they weren’t finding at breweries elsewhere in northern Delaware.

And so when Colatrella arrived, the Vennards already had sour beers in the barrels. A Belgian saison brewed by Dan Vennard had already won a national bronze medal.

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And so Colatrella wasted no time brewing that Flanders red, named after a Macklemore lyric: "All The Love You Won't Forget.”

It took a year in wine barrels for the beer to take on its trademark depth and twang, and even longer to get the vibrant fruitiness that marks the best beers made in Flanders. And when it was finally done, it was named the best Belgian sour in America.

“For that to be like the first thing I did here in sours, I was just still taken aback by it all,” Colatrella said.

Those mixed-fermentation barrel-aged sours are just a small percentage of the beer they sell, said Jimmy Vennard. But it’s a passion project, one that requires patience and a bit of love and maybe also faith.

Just a single mixed-fermentation sour might be for sale at any given time. And that Flanders red is long gone … until next year’s version, anyway.

But as for Autumn Arch’s newest barrel sour? That plummy, wild and dark Hidden Staircase that was released on Black Friday?

We brought a bottle of Hidden Staircase to one of the most prominent beer bars in Philadelphia, and one by one each patron or bartender declared the beer wonderful and surprising: flavorful, subtle, rich, pleasantly sour without puckering your gob. All the flavors of Belgium.

“This is quite an accomplishment,” said one, savoring her glass before drinking another.

“Wait,” said another at the bar, not quite believing her tongue. “This came from Delaware?”

Autumn Arch's beer can be found Wednesday to Sunday at their taproom at 810 Pencader Drive, Glasgow, 302-294-1126, autumnarch.com. Musings is temporarily without a taproom, but you can pick up the beer at shops like Lower Merion and Bryn Mawr Beverage in Pennsylvania. Or check for updates at instagram.com/musingsfermentation.

Matthew Korfhage is business and development reporter in the Delaware region covering all the things that touch land and money: openings and closings, construction, and the many corporations who call the First State home. A longtime food writer, he also tends to turn up with stories about tacos, oysters and beer. Send tips and insults to mkorfhage@gannett.com.

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This article originally appeared on Delaware News Journal: Breweries near Newark, Delaware, named among best Belgian brewers in US