UNITED STATES – One could easily mistake Alesong Brewing & Blending for a winery. The brewery, which opened in 2016 in Eugene, Oregon, makes beer-wine hybrids with local grapes and sells barrel-aged beer through a membership club.

“If you take the word beer out of our business model, we look a lot more like a winery,” said Mr Brian Coombs, a founder and production manager at Alesong, who worked at the nearby King Estate Winery, in the Willamette Valley wine region. In September 2023, Alesong introduced its first wine, a pinot gris, in an effort to broaden the brewery’s creative ambitions and customer base.

“It’s great when you have people who come in and are like, ‘Oh, no, we drink only wine,’ or they have a gluten intolerance,” said Mr Coombs, who plans to buck winemaking conventions by, say, adding cherries or coconut to a pinot noir. “I want to look at wine from a brewer’s perspective.”

Craft breweries have boomed over the past 15 years by breaking flavourful new ground, with no rule too sacred. Now, they are applying that ethos to winemaking, swopping grains for grapes and other fruit to meet the diverse needs of customers who treat taprooms as bars.

The learning curve for making wine can be steep and slow to climb. Breweries can make and refine batches of beer every few weeks, steadily adjusting hops, grains, yeast strains and production techniques. But winemakers produce only one vintage annually. A bad harvest or improper fermentation can impact quality, leaving winemakers with a smaller margin for error and fewer opportunities for on-the-fly refinement.

Mr Pete Ternes, an owner of Middle Brow Beer & Wine Co in Chicago, made trial batches of wine soon after opening a pizza-focused brew pub in 2019. The wine “tasted like nail-polish remover”, Mr Ternes said.

Over time, he refined his techniques and ingredients, driving to Michigan to pick grapes that were later stomped outside the brew pub. One blend of Michigan grapes, accidentally fermented at higher pressure, led to Middle Brow’s fizzy, lambrusco-like Pizza Wine.

“We’re approaching it like scrappy craft brewers,” said Mr Ternes, who started serving the brewery’s wines in 2023.

For businesses like Allagash Brewing in Portland, Maine, getting into winemaking allowed the company to circumvent a clause in its state liquor licence that prohibited the brewery from selling alcoholic beverages from other producers in its taproom.

After securing a winery licence in 2021, Allagash began offering fruit wines made with locally grown honeyberries and blueberries. Winemaking opens a new avenue for creative exploration.

“I’m excited about utilising fruit from Maine that’s not typically fermented into wine,” said Mr Patrick Chavanelle, the senior research and development brewer.

In 2020, Mr Josh Elliott, a former head brewer at Urban Artifact in Cincinnati, left beer altogether to create Fruitblood, a line of sparkling wines made from peaches, boysenberries and cherries. He produces his wines at Urban Artifact, which invested in Fruitblood and had space to house and support a winery, using some of the brewery’s equipment and sharing shipments of high-quality fruit.

The switch to winemaking is even more natural for brewers who are already fermenting fruit. Mr Joe Grimm and Mrs Lauren Grimm, the couple who own Grimm Artisanal Ales in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, embraced the winemaking technique of carbonic maceration to make their fruited sour ales.

“We were like, ‘Oh, we’re making fruit wine. Why don’t we make this with grapes, too?’” Mrs Grimm said.

Last year, the couple released the first vintages of Physica Wines, a sister winery that uses grapes grown on Long Island to make low-intervention wines fermented in stainless steel cubes. The Grimms then steep sour ales with spent grape skins, creating a circular production process in which nothing is wasted. “Our wines all have an associated beer,” Mrs Grimm said.

Persuading people to take wine made in a brewery seriously can be difficult, because it may seem like “this little pet project”, said Mr Tim Gormley, director of Visuals Wine, the winemaking arm of Burial Beer Co in Asheville, North Carolina. To showcase its commitment to winemaking, the brewery will open a rooftop wine bar next month.

Before becoming the head winemaker and farm manager for the cult winery Screaming Eagle in Oakville, California, Mr Nick Gislason brewed beer professionally. Now, he draws on his experiences in both worlds with Hanabi Lager Co, which he opened in 2020 with his wife Jennifer Angelosante.

Inside a friend’s winery in Napa, California, Mr Gislason builds lagers around single varieties of heirloom malt, just as a winery would do with a specific grape varietal, such as chardonnay or riesling.

Time is also an essential ingredient. The lagers from Hanabi are fermented for more than five months, a long time for lagers, to draw out nuanced aromas and flavours that might evoke peppermint or candied orange peel. The meticulous approach to lager fermentation inspired Mr Gislason to approach fermenting his wine with more precision, adjusting temperatures and oxygen exposure to create clean and expressive wines.

“My way of thinking about beer is informed by winemaking,” he said. “Being a brewer makes me a better winemaker, and being a winemaker makes me a better brewer.” NYTIMES