Lost Passion - A Raw Ale

Lost Passion is a beer inspired by traditional farmhouse techniques from Scandinavia and Lithuania. Though they’re incredibly uncommon at this point, there is a long history of brewers making wort that is not boiled. These beers sometimes have a lot in common with Sahti style ales, though this isn’t necessarily exclusive.


Our process for making Lost Passion involved a slightly modified mash and sparge (temperatures were adjusted to achieve pasteurization without producing DMS). While the mash rest was taking place, we boiled hops in a separate vessel. All of the wort was then run into the kettle and the hop tea was added. After this, the wort was not boiled at all. The beer was transferred into an open fermentor and a saison yeast culture was pitched.

Boiling the hop tea. 

A big reason we wanted to make this beer was to showcase the malt that we get from Troubadour Maltings. The base malt for Lost Passion is their Pevec, a malt both grown and malted in Colorado. By not boiling the wort, we believe Lost Passion provides the closest representation of the malt flavor intended by the folks at Troubadour.

There are few known commercial brewers making raw ale. We plan to continue making these beers with the goal of showing off the various flavors from our local malt. As such, each raw ale we make will use a different base malt from Troubadour.

Credit to Lars Marius Garshol for his various research on this style of beer.