Liberté, Égalité, Authenticité — Deck & Donohue in Paris, France

Lump it in the category of pink-washing, green-washing, and rainbow-washing: For brewer Thomas Deck of Paris’ Deck & Donohue, terroir-washing is becoming a bit too pervasive in France.

“It’s a topic that’s very near to my heart,” he says, noting that while these days nearly any product—particularly within the category of alcoholic beverages—seems to be described in terms of its supposed “terroir,” the term just isn’t relevant to most breweries.

“For me, beer today is not a terroir-driven product, but a recipe-driven product,” he says.

Oenophiles know: Terroir is a word that refers to the “hereness” of a wine, a concept that translates to the idea that a product is inextricably linked to the region from whence it comes. But as Deck notes, the fact that most breweries use malts and hops sourced from around the world means that a beer’s identity is less predicated on where it’s brewed and more on who’s brewing it. 

It would be easy, with his winning smile and the charming French accent lacing his otherwise impeccable English, for Deck to co-opt the word and apply it to his range of beers, which are brewed just on the outskirts of the French capital. Many are made with locally cultivated raw materials, and the brewery is forever working to increase its share of organic and French-grown ingredients. But Deck instead eschews the term, refusing to surf on the terroir trend out of respect for the producers, notably winemakers, who devote their lives to crafting products that truly reflect the typicity of their regions.

“I’m really interested in questioning and exploring the idea of terroir in beer,” he adds. “But we will only talk about terroir the day that we have it in beer, and so far, we don’t. So our choice was to say … we don’t want to play the terroir game.”

The irony? In choosing to stay out of the fray, Deck & Donohue may in fact be one of France’s most authentically, obsessively local beer producers.

FRENCH HERITAGE, AMERICAN KNOW-HOW

Deck & Donohue got its start as a collaboration between two friends: Deck and Mike Donohue, an American homebrewer and Deck’s roommate during a foreign exchange stay in the U.S. in 2002. “We became very passionate about brewing and about beer, and we decided—we promised—that one day we would start a brewery together,” says Deck.

Upon his return to France, Deck pledged to try two new beers a day and take notes on his findings.

“It wasn’t a very good idea,” he laughs, but he didn’t lose hope. In 2004, he did an internship at a brewery in his native Alsace, on the border between France and Germany, and in 2005, he and Donohue brewed their first beer together on Mission Street in San Francisco. (Mission Pale Ale, a stalwart of their permanent line, is a souvenir of their homebrewing adventures.)

The brewery was officially founded just outside Paris in 2013, when an IPA on a beer menu still elicited skepticism and confusion from locals, who pronounced it “ee-pay-ah” and were more likely to order their beer based on color—blonde, ambrée, brune—than hop bill or approach to fermentation.

At the time, Deck recalls, “People were like, ‘Oh, I don’t like beer.’ And I was like … that doesn’t mean anything! You don’t say, ‘I don’t like wine.’ You have so many flavors! What do you like? What don’t you like?” It was with this gripe in mind that he focused, from the outset, on crafting “bières de goût”: beers with taste.

Donohue has since left the day-to-day management of the project, but his American perspective still informs the permanent lineup: Trouble #6, a beer brewed with four ancestral grains and Alsatian Aramis hops; Indigo IPA, brewed with Nugget, Chinook, and Citra hops; Monk, a light Brown Ale named for Thelonious Monk; Mission Pale Ale, hopped with Cascade and Mosaic to bring out the sweeter, rounder side of the malts; and a refreshing Pilsner dubbed simply D, “for the simplest of the simplest,” says Deck. “It’s a Pilsner you don’t do tasting notes for, but just enjoy it.”

But beneath this cultivation of goût, there was a second philosophy already, ahem, brewing. 

If you look closely at the minimalist labels, beneath each beer’s name you’ll find the phrase “bières de sens.” The meaning is tough to translate, and toys with a double entendre. “Sens,” in French, has both the connotation of the senses (including taste) as well as direction and meaning.

“Taste, you can obtain very artificially,” says Deck. “So the idea of bière de sens is a commitment to both. Bière de goût needs to be excellent at the end, and bière de sens, the process needs to be thought of.”

“When we claimed Deck & Donohue as a name, it doesn’t sound local. But we’re fundamentally local, and we do it in our acts and by the way we distribute.”

This latter element, he believes, is something that’s fallen by the wayside, at a time of prevalent greenwashing, when labels speak more than what’s behind them. “Le goût du sens is about … digging a bit deeper into what we do, and not just putting a French flag and ‘organic’ and all that [on the label],” he says.

He stumbles over his words and laughs good-naturedly at himself, as though surprised at what’s come out of his mouth. “If you say it, it can be sort of corny,” he says. “So it’s not about saying it; it’s about using [that idea] to make [sure] that’s what we actually do.”

That Deck is true to his word seems evident on site at the brewery, located in an industrial zone in Bonneuil, just southeast of the city. The cavernous space is cold and a little forbidding, and that’s no surprise—it’s not open to the public the way the original location in trendy Montreuil was. The latter was phased out beginning in 2016 to accommodate a need for a larger capacity (35 hectoliters, or 30 barrels, in Bonneuil, as compared to just 400 liters, or 3.5 BBLs, in Montreuil) before closing definitively in 2019. In a blog post announcing the decision, Deck wrote that he didn’t want to “pretend” to have a local Montreuil brewery, despite still brewing special editions there and opening the space to the public every Saturday. It felt, to him, inauthentic—and so it is now, in this new space, that his small team carries out their work.

“They don’t take people for idiots, here,” says Charlotte Inigo, a quality engineer and brewer at Deck & Donohue for just over a year. “If they did, I think I’d be gone.”

ON LOCATION

At the brewery where Deck first interned 15 years ago, “The name of the brewery was the name of the village.” It was a major draw, he says, for busloads of tourists who would stop by for Alsatian souvenirs. “We would sell them terroir that doesn’t exist. I spent two months there, and in two months, no inhabitant of the village ever stopped by the brewery.”

He bore this in mind when naming Deck & Donohue, evoking not the city of Paris, nor Montreuil, nor, for that matter, France at all. Deck & Donohue hearkened, instead, to the story of its founders’ partnership, to the people and ideas behind the brand. But despite distancing themselves, at least in name, from strict localism, the pair cultivated a closeness with their community, welcoming them to the brewery long before any other beer businesses in France had open-door days. And while the new location in Bonneuil is less conducive to such policies, that community focus persists. 

“Still last year, 93% of our deliveries were in a 30-kilometer radius around the brewery,” Deck says. “When we claimed Deck & Donohue as a name, it doesn’t sound local. But we’re fundamentally local, and we do it in our acts and by the way we distribute.”

“If you’re a chef in Paris, 2021, you’re not gonna go like, ‘Oh, yeah, I want acidity—let’s get passion fruit.’ You would look for something local. And I think the beer world is a bit delayed, as compared to wine and gastronomy, in terms of thinking about local, and what you can use.”

This is particularly evident in the brewery’s seasonal releases, like an IPA made with fresh hops harvested in September 2021 in Bonnelles, 31 miles from the brewery. Or Brumaire et Frimaire, an autumnal Ale made with organic local pumpkin and named for the second and third months of the French Republican calendar, which correspond to the period from late October to mid-December and are derived, respectively, from the French words for fog (brume) and frost (frime). For these and other one-off beers made from everything from hand-harvested organic oregano to wine barrels schnorred from friends, Deck is governed by his natural curiosity and pursuit of authenticity, a value system he never quite articulates but which nevertheless permeates everything he says and does. 

In crafting a recent Berliner Weisse, for example, Deck journeyed to a farm just outside of Paris, in Seine-et-Marne.

“I wanted to milk a cow, but I never milked a cow before, so they were like, ‘Don’t impose this on the cow,’” he grins. Instead, he trusted the pros in obtaining local milk, which he first made into yogurt before using it as a Lactobacillus culture to inoculate a portion of wort. This starter was then added to the remaining wort. As a result, he says, “We had the most natural lactic fermentation we could, and with a local element, because it was 50 kilometers away.”

The finished beer was “super acidic, really refreshing and explosive.” To top it all off, for even more richness, he aged a portion of the beer in pinot noir barrels from Burgundy for six months—a risk that he wasn’t sure would pay off until he finally tasted the finished product.

“A beer like this, you don’t always know how it’s gonna be,” he says. “But today, we don’t want to do explorations with crazy, exotic ingredients. We want to do explorations with very simple things that we can find around our brewery, and then we complicate it with the process.” 

In this, he is similar to many locavore-minded chefs. “If you’re a chef in Paris, 2021, you’re not gonna go like, ‘Oh, yeah, I want acidity—let’s get passion fruit,’” Deck says. “You would look for something local. And I think the beer world is a bit delayed, as compared to wine and gastronomy, in terms of thinking about local, and what you can use.”

SUSTAINABILITY ON THE BRAIN

Beer is an energy-intensive product. U.S. breweries spend more than $200 million in energy costs every year, and the average brewery uses seven gallons of water to produce just one gallon of beer. Breweries are forever sourcing malts, hops, and more from opposite ends of the globe—and as the pandemic’s supply chain disruptions have shown, many raw materials are only going to become harder, and more expensive, to get ahold of.

Aware of the industry’s sustainability challenges, Deck & Donohue is actively considering how it can reduce its carbon footprint. That begins, Deck believes, with a firm commitment to local distribution. Today, the brewery’s beers are not available outside of France, and frankly, that’s unlikely to change anytime soon.

Local is also the name of the game when it comes to sourcing—but it’s not necessarily easy to marry the quality Deck seeks with what’s widely available nearby. The beers have, for example, been brewed with organic, French malt from the very beginning, but hops have hailed half from Deck’s native Alsace and half from the U.S., for the “explosive flavors” French craft beer drinkers had begun to expect. In 2018, however, Deck decided not only to progressively reduce his reliance on American hops, but also to commit to a transition to 100% organic ingredients, allowances be damned. Today, the brewery relies on 90% organic hops and 100% organic, French malt. “We’re 90% European and 90% organic,” he says. “And in two years, we’ll be 70% French and 100% organic.”

He rattles off these facts easily, proudly, but then takes a step back to contextualize. “It doesn’t seem like much,” he says. “Because it’s like, ‘Oh, we have hops from Spain, so no one’s gonna think this is local. But in the hops world, this is what you can do.”

If he were to attempt to source all of his hops locally, he simply wouldn’t find the quality or varieties he needs—at least not yet. “It’s about trying to look at things at two paces,” he says. First as a business, and second “as a sort of explorer.” It is in his small-batch experimentations, he says, that he can delve into the “ultra-local,” for example in his work with the 40-grower cooperative Comptoir Agricole in Alsace, currently responsible for about 95% of French hop production. But development of new hops is slow-going, requiring up to a decade for varieties to be bred, tested first for disease resistance, and then analyzed for flavor profile.

For now, Deck welcomes the opportunity to be in the testing loop. A member of the Agrof’ile agroforestry association in Île-de-France, he has access to ingredients like unmalted wheat from the organic Ferme du Chaillois, which is seeking to revitalize heritage varieties that had largely disappeared during the rise of industrialized bread-making. To remain true to the spirit of the experiment, and for lack of a local micro-maltster, Deck adds a small percentage of the unmalted grains to his recipes, along with other, malted grains to promote healthy fermentation.

“It’s a bit of a struggle of organic, local, and natural, and how do you play with those to have something that doesn’t take 10 years to complete,” he says. “Or that takes 10 years to complete … but what can you do in the short term?”

Another farm in the network, he says, is currently planting heirloom barley varieties that may be ready for a test batch in four years. “I think it’s interesting for us as a brewer,” he says. “Our process is three weeks; the agricultural world, it’s three years, five years, 10 years. And I think it’s interesting to try to mix those times.”

One project he’s been considering lately is using a Bolivian black barley to make an untoasted Brown Ale.

“Normally, when you do a Brown Ale, you’re gonna toast your malt,” he explains. “My question here is: Can you make beer with naturally pigmented barley, and does it have any flavor? Can you do a Pils that is gonna be black because it’s pigmented, and you don’t need the roasting flavor? Maybe the color disappears in the process. I don’t know.” He laughs. “We need to wait two years to be able to try.”

A MEETING OF MINDS

“I was mentioning that place where I interned, and I said no one ever stopped by the brewery from the village,” recalls Deck. “I was lying. There was one person actually from the village. And that was the farmer. The farmer was coming and getting spent grain.”

Spent grain makes up about 85% of brewing waste, and it was already on Deck’s mind when he started the brewery. In an effort to reduce this impact, then, he began one of his deepest and most sustained local partnerships: his collaboration with Agnès Sourisseau, the experimental agroforestry expert behind the Ferme des Monts Gardés.

When Sourisseau first agreed to come collect Deck’s spent grain, he says, he was brewing eight BBLs a day and had approximately 200 kilos to share. “We put it into bags and loaded it up in her car, and she would go to her farm,” he recalls.

“It was a material I didn’t know anything about,” says Sourisseau. “So at the beginning, I did trials.” Soon, Sourisseau was making regular trips to the brewery for the nitrogen-rich waste item. “She told me one day, ‘Oh, if you come and look at everything I do with it, you’re not gonna give it to me anymore; you will want to sell it to me,’” says Deck.

“It’s nice to meet people in the food business who understand that you need to work from field to plate and from plate to field.”

Today, the brewery relies on Moulinot, a food waste transport specialist that delivers the spent grain to Sourisseau’s farm in compressed natural gas-powered vehicles. She now uses it not only to keep the soil moist, but also to feed her sheep, donkeys, horses, and chickens. “It’s better that a waste product that comes from agricultural production go back into the soil, to my mind, rather than into methanizers, or who knows where?” says Sourisseau.

Deck & Donohue also sources some ingredients from Sourisseau’s farm, such as oregano, berries, and, on occasion, the pumpkin for Brumaire et Frimaire, grown in a patch nourished by spent grain. Deck has attempted, too, to grow his own hops there since 2015—thus far in vain, thanks to Sourisseau’s staunch anti-irrigation stance.

“I like Agnès because she looks on a very different timescale than us,” laughs Deck. “So I’d be like, ‘Why don’t you add water? Everything’s gonna die.’ And she’s like, ‘Yeah, but we want the plant to get robust and have its own life, and I don’t want to help it.’ So it’s like, ‘Yeah, but then we’re not gonna have hops this year!’ And she’s like… ‘Yeah.’”

Sourisseau also grows merise, or coffee plum, which she says is difficult to commercialize except for distillation. Several years ago, Deck and his team hand-harvested the fruit from a single tree and used it to brew an ultra-local Kriek. It was a success, and one that Deck would love to replicate.

“I think last year, the birds ate them all before we arrived,” he says. “This year everything had frozen during the year, so there were none. So it’s a beer we really like, but we cannot brew it again.”

This seems less worrisome to Deck than amusing. “I like this exposure to nature,” he says. “If we order online, they will always find the malt for us. Maybe it’s not from the same plant or from the same farm, but it always arrives. So being in direct contact with farmers gives you more perspective on this, and I find it very enriching today.”

Sourisseau, too, likes Deck’s philosophy. “It’s the antithesis of greenwashing,” says Sourisseau. “It’s a new way of working, and I think they really incarnate a new generation of engaged professionals.” 

Since Sourisseau doesn’t have any full-time employees, Deck and his team often lend a hand, bringing arms, legs, and bits and pieces for a lunch to enjoy all together when the work is through. “It’s nice,” she says, “to meet people in the food business who understand that you need to work from field to plate and from plate to field.”

CROSS-POLLINATION

In one corner of the warehouse-like brewery, burlap bags are piled atop one another, filled not with malt but with coffee beans.

“You’re standing in Ten Belles territory,” Deck jokes. A step to the left and I’m back in the brewery, brushing up, instead, against barrels sourced from winemaker friends in Burgundy, Alsace, or, soon, nearby Chelles, palpable evidence of the bonds Deck has long forged with the like-minded individuals in his network.

When he first started homebrewing, for example, Deck shared a smoked beer with his friends at the pioneering small-plates restaurant Au Passage; they later spent a whole day smoking malt over vinewood to craft a special, limited-edition beer for the restaurant. He ages some of his beers in old wine barrels, which he likes for the additional complexity they impart. 

As for the coffee beans, those belong to local sourdough bakery and coffee shop Ten Belles. The team rents a small space in his brewery for their coffee-roasting operations, and Deck integrates a portion of their unsold bread in his kvass, an Eastern European fermented beverage he crafted at the behest of a Moldavian driver at the brewery.

But one of the most enticing business partnerships is perhaps the one he’s cultivated with the person who is also his partner in life: Daniela Lavadenz.

In Paris’ 11th arrondissement, you can throw a rock and hit five trendy restaurants, including Le Saint-Sébastien, hidden down a quiet side street of the same name. After leaving a successful career in business, Lavadenz opened this restaurant here in 2018, but from the outset, the couple was careful not to create a “branded” restaurant. At the Formica bar, retained from the former neighborhood bistro, Deck & Donohue beer is on tap and available in bottles, of course. But Lavadenz has also cultivated a 400-bottle-rich wine list that is a far bigger draw. 

“These are two separate projects,” says Deck.

But the link has nevertheless inspired the restaurant’s chef—the Australian-born Chris Edwards, who Deck dubs “an avid beer drinker”—to carry out experimentations of his own.

“I think of it as using up the stuff that [Deck] can’t use. There’s no point in just using the beer [as an ingredient]. It’s not very interesting. It’s better to try to find something that helps Thomas, that helps the restaurant reduce waste.”

Edwards’ career has long been colored by his vested interest in sustainability and, notably, upcycling food waste, which in France represents about 10% of the food bought by restaurants. “In every job for years and years, it’s been my role, a little bit, in different kitchens,” says Edwards. “If you see something being thrown away or not used, I was always the one picking it up.”

After moving from sous-chef to chef earlier this year, Edwards found that the culture he had inculcated had come back to bite him. 

“It’s funny for me now, being in charge, because I always used to just make this shit, like loads of different stuff and I didn’t know what to do with it,” he says. “But it wasn’t really my responsibility. I’d just be like, you know, ‘Oh, here you go, chef, we’ve made some weird thing.’” He laughs. “But now everyone in the kitchen is doing the same thing. And sometimes I’m having to say … we don’t have any boxes left. You just have to throw it out.”

Most of the time, though, Edwards finds a way to put waste products to work. Waste beer is upcycled into batter to make a crunchy garnish of “pure fried dough.” A batch of oregano beer gone awry was used to ferment a shipment of local mirabelle plums. He has plans to craft a slow-evaporated beer salt, and he has recently begun asking the brewery to siphon off a kilo or two of spent grain for his culinary experiments. Thus far, it’s appeared as a cracker to accompany steak tartare and an amuse bouche topped with a dehydrated tomato powder made from tomato skins that otherwise would have been binned.

“I think of it as using up the stuff that [Deck] can’t use,” says Edwards. “There’s no point in just using the beer [as an ingredient]. It’s not very interesting. It’s better to try to find something that helps Thomas, that helps the restaurant reduce waste.”

The restaurant is also a lynchpin in completing the circle started between the brewery and Sourisseau’s farm. Indeed, Sourisseau collects coffee grounds and corks from the restaurant and provides the kitchen with a lot of its vegetables, as well as handsome capons fed on the spent grain from the brewery and finished on milk-soaked bread from Ten Belles. The capons were intended to be served last Christmas, but due to lockdown, they were instead aged several more months and served at a special dinner at the restaurant, alongside Deck’s beer and Ten Belles sourdough.

“The idea was to create a real circle,” says Deck, who is already planning for the next iteration of this beer dinner—not as a branded experience, but as a means of celebrating the locavore circle created among this set of like-minded friends.

TERROIR-DRIVEN, NOT -WASHED

Deck’s mind is constantly whirring with new experiments and ideas. It’s particularly fascinating to watch, seeing as he’s consistently been at the forefront of French brewing trends. 

“I think the situation changed really rapidly—the perception of beer. Ten years ago, when I was saying, ‘I want to start a brewery,’ people were like, ‘Such a bad idea! Why would you do this?’” He laughs. “Today, it’s like, ‘Oh, yeah, of course, oh, yeah, my cousin has a brewery.’”

Beer may be the last frontier in this quality- and locality-driven period in French food and drink, which has dominated for several decades, ever since the bistronomy movement took hold in the early ’90s. “Ten years ago, you could go to a place where they could name the producers of the vegetables, of their meat, of their wine,” Deck says. “But they could sell Heineken, and no one really cared.”

The brewery’s focus these days is growing ever more hyperlocal. Deck’s pet interest at the moment? The possibility of spontaneously fermenting local, unmalted grains and transforming them into a starter to ferment a beer made from the same grains, this time malted.

One place where terroir already appears uncontested is in Deck’s sole non-beer-related offering: an artisanal, alcohol-free soda called Ricochet, made in-house with local honey, peppermint, and rosemary. The organic lemons, however, come from Sicily.

“We accept that there’s no lemons around [here],” he chuckles. “We’re not ayatollahs of local, but we’re happy to start with this. And then next year, I would like to brew 100% local soda. Probably rhubarb, elderflower, and local honey.”

The soda experiment allows him to create local products in far less time than it would take to cultivate similar supply chains for beer.

“You can plant rosemary and have rosemary the same year, whereas [for] hops, it takes three years,” he says. “So this is a side project where we can experiment [with] lots of things and see more immediate results. And then the same people have ancient grain varieties, and so we said, we’ll see you in five years!”

Words by Emily Monaco
Photos by Eileen Cho