Chris Nascimento from the West Side’s Brew Monkeys homebrew shop has started his contributing writing over at Queen City Drinks off with quite a bang.  His article on Northside’s Urban Artifact Brewing was posted yesterday, and one big nugget of information jumped straight out of it to me.

Urban Artifact will focus their brewing on Sour and Wild beers.

I love this more than my fingers can type.  Although we already have a great brewery that has shifted it’s focus towards sour and barrel aged beers here in Cincinnati with Rivertown Brewing, and I would never say that Urban Artifact and Rivertown will be “competitors”, having these two breweries in the same city can only force them both to constantly step up their individual games.

Urban Artifact is pulling wild yeasts from the city to use in their beers, with a Lactobacillus strain that they have pulled from the bell tower of the church being called “Unbelieveable” by brewer Bret Knollmann Baker.  Suddenly, the name Urban Artifact is really starting to click and make sense.  The science behind the process of creating these beers isn’t something to take lightly, and these are styles that aren’t for the faint of heart brewing operations.  When asked by Nascimento about what styles they will be creating, Bret had this to say:

“Not just Belgian beers, but beers with Belgian, German and Flemish influences. What we are producing is more microbiologically inspired. We have a love of microbiology and will be using old world techniques with modern scientific application to increase the consistency & quality of what we produce.”

It’s looking like Urban Artifact is going to really create some waves here in the beer community.  A welcome addition to a beer bubble that is FAR from being full.