Capturing some local microflora with apple juice. Two types of wild flowers and a control. Left out overnight in the Texas winter, now incubating at 75F.

Along side Jester King as one of my favorite breweries is Prairie Artisan Ales.  They’ve been churning out great beer after beer.  Prairie is always experimenting and playing with bold flavors while mixing in healthy amounts of barrel aging.  One of their earlier beers captured my attention.  Funky Galaxy.  When fresh, this beer delivers this amazing CDA/Black IPA punch, but with a light farmhouse funk in the nose, but enough citrus and tropical fruits that it drinks really easy.

Here’s the fun part: if you sit on this one for a few months the Brett transforms the beer dramatically.  Much of the hop aroma fades and/or is consumed by the Brett and produces one of the *funkiest* Brett B beers I’ve ever had.  Comparing a freshly bottled beer side-by-side to an aged one makes one wonder if these were even the same beer at all.

This one has been on my list for some time but never got to brew it.  I’ve had some really good success with using Jester King mixed culture yeast and bacteria.  The Boxer’s Revenge inspired one gallon batch is already amazing at two months, only needed a little more oak character before bottling.  This recipe has about 30 IBU so I know that the JK yeast will send plenty of sour punch with this recipe.  Mixing that with the roast and citrus hops should make for a very tasty brew.

The origin of the malt bill was inspired from Hops and Grain’s Dark IPA that they brewed a few years back that I really enjoyed.  I picked that back up here and bumped the gravity up to match the 8% of Funky Galaxy, and switched the hops to Galaxy and Citra for a really nice citrus/tropical fruit nose.  Looking forward to brewing a bigger batch on the full-scale equipment as well.

Here’s Pfunky Galaxy