Why Jackie O’s Pawpaw Beer is A Seasonal Specialty You Won’t Want to Miss
"Maturing Paw Paw Fruit-Edit" by ☼☼Jo Zimny Photos☼☼ is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Pawpaw is a creamy fruit that flourishes in the forests of the eastern parts of North America. While it’s typically used in desserts and baked goods, breweries from Ohio to the Mid-Atlantic are using it as well. Jackie O’s, a brewery and distributor renowned for their bourbon barrel aged stouts and barley wines has spent the last decade perfecting its pawpaw beers
Why brew Beer with Pawpaw fruit?
"Pawpaw fruit cut" by alumroot is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
There are several challenges to making beer with paw paw fruit. The seeds of the largest edible fruit in America are annoyingly difficult to work around. Unlike the mango which has one large white seed or the papaya with lots of small black seeds that can be quickly and easily scooped out from the center of the fruit, the tropical tasting pawpaw is filled with tons of large black seeds that are hard to extricate from its edible flesh.
Though the pawpaw can be found growing in the wild from the Mid-Atlantic North to Canada and West to Wisconsin and, more recently, in orchards throughout the US, experts say the fruit is less well known than, say, the apple or the blueberry, because the fruit’s picking season is as short as its staying power. Pawpaw trees bear fruit for only about six weeks in late summer, the fruit bruises easily and once picked, the pawpaw only lasts a few days — about a week, refrigerated. The pawpaw is, let’s just say, commercially challenging.
Seth Morton, head brewer
But those who bake or brew with the fruit (which is described as looking like a squat banana or a green potato) say the flavor is worth the effort. A pawpaw tastes like what you’d get if you crossed a banana with a pineapple and mango, even a little vanilla, and some say, cantaloupe. “[It’s] flavor is wild, delicate and delicious and tropical, not very assertive,” says Seth Morton, the head brewer at Jackie O’s in Athens, Ohio, and a fun seasonal item to work with.
Jackie O’s Paw Paw Wheat Beer
Despite the challenges, for more than ten years, West End Distillery has been making Paw Paw Wheat beer using a recipe that is pretty historical in southeastern Ohio brewing lore and pawpaw brewing, in general according to Morton. The co-founder of Athens’ West End Distillery, Kelly Sauber, came up with the recipe a few decades ago. “He’s like the OG of fermentation in the area and has been in the game for a very long time,” says Morton of Sauber. Each year Jackie O’s brews up Sauber’s recipe — made with fermented brewers yeast — for the annual Ohio Pawpaw Festival. The festival draws about ten-thousand people and is one of at least 13 pawpaw festivals held each fall and the largest. “People who have been coming to the pawpaw festival for years expect that recipe.” Jackie O’s makes about 300 gallons of Paw Paw Wheat for the festival. It’s a 9 percent ABV bruiser made with pureed pawpaw.
Paw Paw Wild Ale
But Jackie O’s pawpaw play doesn’t end there. Morton loves to experiment with the fruit’s flavor balance. So, the brewery also makes a sour or mixed fermentation pawpaw beer — a wild ale — produced with brewers yeast, wild yeast and lactic acid producing microbes. “Pawpaw is a lovely, lovely fruit to add to refermentation of mixed-fermentation beer. The acidity of mixed fermentation beer as well as some of the funky wild yeast flavors that you get from mixed-fermentation culture lends itself very well to the rather wild and tropical flavor of the pawpaw,” says Morton, who adds that when working with pawpaw as a brewer, you need to let the fruit be in charge. “You can't really go too over the top … You have to cater to the fruit,” he says. Though he knows some brewers will put pawpaw in IPAs, that, he says, “Tends to have, in my opinion, a little bit too assertive a flavor profile.”
Seasonal Experimentation
Because “pawpaw are in season for about 45 minutes,” Morton says laughing, and because fermentation takes about a month, the pawpaw beer Jackie O’s brews up is made from frozen pawpaw which they source locally from Integration Acres — with the seeds removed and the pulp pureed and ready to be added to the barrel once its thawed. Pawpaw pulp can be frozen for up to 6 months. Morton says they add about ten pounds of the puree per barrel once they’ve hit high kräusen — that’s the head of foam that forms on the surface of beer at the peak of fermentation.
Each year as the brewery experiments with the pawpaw’s flavors they find good fruit partners to pair with its delicate, tropical-taste profile. Some of Morton’s favorite partners include the bold flavors of raspberry and wild cherry.
The brewery distributes locally in Ohio and as far away as the EU and Japan but their paw paw fruit is only available seasonally.