It started with a few barrels being allocated towards a small series of beers, followed by a Blonde Ale that was tested with a few different strains of Brett during secondary fermentation. It eventually lead to the Inland Sea series, a collection that includes several sour ales in addition to other barrel-aged beers to honor the Great Lakes region. And once the experimentation began, it was hard to stop. There was a watermelon phase, then grapefruit, raspberry, and cherry.

“It's a bit of an addiction for me, because it's fun and the flavors that we get are really interesting and just so wonderful,” Bautz says. “Right now, we're working with a lot of grape. We're looking to enhance the wine flavors from fermenting them with Brett in wine barrels. We're in that zone right now, because it transfers so well to brewing. I really love the flavors from it. They're so complex. There's a lot of nurturing in it. It's really satisfying to see your baby growing up and going out the door.”

Brett has an incredible bandwidth for what it can do in beer, and Bautz has enjoyed playing with different ways to get the flavors he wants. In addition to wild fermentations aged in barrels for extended periods of time, he kettle sours some of his beers, adding Lactobacillus to the wort to get the flavors he’s looking for faster. There has only been one Lake Effect Inland Sea beer that was purely kettle soured with Lacto, a blueberry Berliner Weisse that’s fittingly-if-not-imaginitively called Blueberry Berliner Weisse. Everything else that’s soured during the boil has been used as a blending agent to either tighten up the flavor profile of an aged beer coming out of a barrel or to make the final flavors more complex.