For Many Craft Breweries, Winemaking is the Next Frontier | SevenFifty Daily

For years, breweries have tried courting wine drinkers by adding crushed grapes, juice, and pomace to IPAs, saisons, and barrel-aged sour ales. The best examples could channel a wine’s moxie, but going halfway wasn’t always enough. (Legally, at least 51 percent of a beer’s fermentable sugars must come from grain.)

“I’ve had amazing wine-beer hybrids, but part of the reason I loved them was because they’re as vinous a beer that you can make,” says Tim Gormley, a founder and the director of development for Burial Beer in Asheville, North Carolina. “Perhaps it would’ve been better if it was just a wine.”

For SevenFifty Daily, I look at how craft breweries view winemaking as the next fermented frontier.