The Serpent story started nearly two years ago when Oliver and Lovatt were put in touch with Tom Oliver at Oliver’s Cider and Perry, who produces some of the most complex ciders and perries in England, which rely on natural yeast and bacteria present on the fruit for fermentation.

“This type of project is based on some of the stuff we have been doing at Brooklyn in a whole range of beers where we’ve done secondary ageing in barrels on sets of yeasts from other wild fermentations,” explains Oliver. “Through natural lees, it is possible to take the fermentative “terroir” of a piece of countryside and concentrate it into a relatively small amount of liquid, and then have that terroir proliferate through a beer.

If someone didn’t tell you that Serpent was a beer, you might at first think that it was a cider, or perhaps an Arbois wine. The apple-like aromatics are apparent, along with a hint of oak, expansive fruit and a long bone-dry finish.”

Oliver, who has Molly Browning, Brooklyn’s Barrel Program Manager with him, started this type of brewing process initially on a very small scale in the US, owing to the fact that there were very few producers that were doing the purely natural fermentation that he required. “We were looking at five or six barrels at a time, nothing more.”

“So that’s why I turned to scrumpy and to England. I’m into natural fermentation in wines, and cider. But at first, when I was offered cider lees, I must admit I wondered what on earth I was expected to be doing with those!” he explains. But after conversations with Lovatt and his team who, according to Oliver were probably the only ones crazy enough to want to do this too, they went ahead with it.

“In order to do it, we all had to learn a lot of new things to ensure that our collaboration with cider producer Tom Oliver would enable all the elements we want to come together. I hope when people taste it, they’ll agree that it’s on the edge of a beer and a cider, despite only have a small cider element in it.”