Brasserie des Voirons, Bière Vivante de Têtu 2024

Brasserie des Voirons feels less like a modern craft brewery and more like a tiny Alpine fermentation laboratory run by people who are deeply, gloriously obsessed with flavour. Hidden away in the Haute-Savoie village of Lucinges beneath Mont Blanc, the brewery produces wild, organic beers that blur the line between farmhouse ale, natural wine and full-on mountain witchcraft. In a very good way.

The project is led by Christophe and Barbara Grellier, whose background in fine dining and natural wine heavily shapes the brewery’s style. Christophe previously worked in seriously high-end kitchens before taking over the tiny local brewery in 2013, bringing a chef’s mentality to brewing. That means spontaneous fermentation, long ageing, amphora macerations, wine lees, foraged herbs, citrus peels, berries and barrels borrowed from some of France’s best natural winemakers all regularly finding their way into the beers. Which sounds dangerously close to someone making soup at first, but the results are genuinely stunning.

The water itself plays a huge role too. The brewery uses incredibly pure Alpine water drawn from the same glacial system that feeds Evian, giving the beers this crisp luminous quality underneath all the wild fermentation and earthy complexity. Even the simpler LUG beers, blonde, blanche, brune and rousse, carry this clean mineral freshness that makes them feel effortlessly drinkable despite all the craftsmanship going on behind the scenes.

Then things get properly interesting with the “Bières Vivantes” and “Vigneronne” series, where beer starts colliding beautifully with the natural wine world. Some are fermented with grape skins or wine lees, others are infused with wildflowers, quince, herbs or citrus and aged for months in barrel or stoneware amphora. They stay unfiltered, unpasteurised and alive in bottle, evolving over time in ways that feel far closer to fine wine than conventional beer. The whole range has this wonderfully rustic but precise personality: energetic, slightly wild and packed with sense of place.

There’s also something very French about the whole philosophy. These aren’t beers built for untappd scores, neon branding or aggressively hopped palate destruction. They’re made for tables, food, conversation and people who enjoy fermentation getting a little weird without losing elegance. Quietly brilliant stuff.