The Art of Vinifying Grains — Brasserie Ammonite in Burgundy, France

It’s faded by the sun, but you can just about make out the words “Brasserie Ammonite” (Ammonite Brewery) on the small wooden plaque outside Simon Lecomte’s home. He lives in Sennecey-le-Grand, a small village in Burgundy, France, and his brewery is located in a 17th-century barn attached to his family home. Not that it looks much like a brewery. If the brewhouse standing out in the yard resembles an old milk tank, it’s because that’s what it once was. 

Lecomte himself resembles something else, too. He might have the stereotypical brewer’s beard and tattoos, but his personal uniform, as he likes to call it, almost always includes a “doudoune sans manches,” the insulated vest frequently worn by winemakers.

And yet Ammonite (named after a fossilized, extinct sea creature Lecomte found in his barn) definitely is a brewery—one of the most sought-after beer makers in France today. Since its founding in 2018, Lecomte’s brewery has made a name for itself, with a closed-to-new-members allocation club for new releases, a lengthy waiting list just to join that club, and a position at the very center of contemporary French beer fandom. 

Hand-me-down equipment adds to its homespun atmosphere, like the 40-year-old bottling unit that was originally owned by Les Pères Chartreux—makers of the neon-green Chartreuse liqueur—which stands more or less safe from the rain under a small awning. A string of lights lends a DIY touch, and a few feet away, toys lie on the grass where Lecomte’s four-year-old son Marius likes to play when he’s not helping with bottle labeling. Soon he’ll be joined by his little sister Rose, who is just a year old.

While much of Lecomte’s equipment is visible in the yard, the barn is where the magic really happens. The barrel cellar, filled with so many casks that there’s little room to navigate, is dark and dusty, with aged wooden beams and a single light on the ceiling that isn’t strong enough to illuminate the entire space. Ammonite is dedicated to making raw and spontaneously fermented beers in these barrels, which Lecomte has largely sourced himself. And even if many drinkers in this vinous part of the world might not recognize them as beers at first sip, that hasn’t prevented hype around this small brewery from growing to a fever pitch.

HISTORY IN THE MAKING

At Ammonite, every cask is marked in chalk, indicating almost everything about it, from what it used to contain to what it holds now. Each has its own place, though their collective organization only makes sense to Lecomte.

“This is the dry cellar, and the two caves under the house act as the wet cellar, with clay soil, which affects the barrels in many ways,” he says. With a dry cellar, he explains, water evaporates while alcohol remains, creating beers that are really dry and—to use a term employed by winemakers—“nerveuse,” which implies both freshness and acidity. In wet cellars, however, alcohol usually decreases, although things don’t exactly work the same way here. “I haven’t noticed any alcohol loss in my beers because they’re already low-ABV, and it makes the beer more opulent and sweet,” he says.  

When asked about a favorite barrel, his eyes light up. “Follow me through the labyrinth,” he says, disappearing through a small passage between the front door and a pile of cardboard.  Ammonite’s barn is only 50 square meters, or about 540 square feet, but comparing it to a maze doesn’t feel like an overstatement.

He points to his favorite, which stands alone in the middle of a row, unlike the others stacked nearby. Dating from 1931, the cask first held tawny port, followed by calvados in the 1980s. The French cidery Hérout, in Normandy, used the cask before donating it to Lecomte. “It’s 90 years old and still in pretty good shape,” he says. “It’s a piece of history.”

“I don’t do anything that’s working in craft beer at the moment. My beers don’t have high ABV. They’re not full of hops, or a big Imperial Stout. I don’t put eccentric adjuncts in them.”

Lecomte tells me that story as we taste Soliste I, a beer that was aged in the barrel, with a stack of boxes serving as our tasting table. Spontaneously fermented on Hérout cider lees, it smells like straw with a hint of apple. The taste is fruity, highly drinkable, and sour.

Lecomte can tell you the story of each of the roughly 300 barrels in his possession, as well as how he found and bought them. Take the three black chestnut casks in a dark corner of the cellar: sherry barrels from Valdespino that date from 1918. “Normally, they never sell them, but my mom is Spanish, and she found a way,” he says with a grin. They also happen to be his most expensive, costing €1,000, or about $1,090, each. 

Just above them sits a beautiful oak barrel that previously contained Burgundy’s Monthelie wine. “There’s a 50-year waiting list to buy a barrel made by this particular French cooper, and no one knows his name,” Lecomte says. Instead of signing his casks, the unknown cooper sometimes carves “DSLS” on them, which stands for “Dieu seul le sait,” or “God only knows.” 

Lecomte treats his barrels with an exquisite level of care, employing a hands-on—or rather nose-on—approach. “Every barrel has been sniffed,” he says, laughing. While he understands that not every brewer or winemaker has the time to select barrels themselves, he doesn’t want to buy from used barrel vendors. Instead, he cites the benefits of sourcing them directly from winemakers. 

“You don’t know how the barrels have been stocked, for how long, or exactly what kind of bourbon or pinot noir they contained,” he says. 

On a shelf at the back of the cellar hangs a black-and-white photograph of an old man in a sea of casks. It’s Lecomte’s great-grandfather, Hippolyte Cortot, who was in charge of a wine cellar in the 1950s. (He was also a proud member of the music group Les Joyeux Bourguignons, who performed on Broadway after World War II, though that’s another story entirely). Cortot is Lecomte’s only real link to the wine world, as he doesn’t come from a family of winemakers or grape growers. His great-grandfather taught his grandfather the art of wine tasting, who then taught Lecomte’s mother, who taught him. 

But there’s more, as always, with Lecomte, who says that his grandfather tasted wine like no one else, even when he got cancer due to his work. Until he was 18, Lecomte himself never drank a drop of alcohol and actually despised the idea of drinking, which feels quite rebellious for a French teenager, and fairly ironic now. But on his birthday that year, his grandfather Maurice insisted that they visit a famous winemaking domain together, Burgundy’s celebrated Château de Pommard.

It was a bummer, he says, to be dragged by his grandfather into an activity he didn’t care about on his birthday, and he initially refused to taste any wine. Then came the very last glass: a Corton Clos du Roi, a Grand Cru from 1928. It was from his grandfather’s year of birth, and Lecomte felt he couldn’t say no. 

“I tasted it, and it changed my life,” he says. “I started describing to the sommelier everything I was feeling, tasting, experiencing.” 

After that, Lecomte traveled through Europe and farther afield, trying to discover every wine region he could, saving pennies for trips to Georgia, Lebanon, and other destinations. Camille, his then-girlfriend (now his wife), encouraged him to make it his full-time job. He studied viticulture at a local specialist college, La Viti de Beaune, and became a freelance educator and consultant. Outside of Ammonite, Lecomte now works as an instructor at that college, where he teaches winemaking techniques.

THE GRAIN WINEMAKER

With that background, it’s no wonder Lecomte is often compared to a winemaker. And it’s not just because he’s located in one of the country’s top wine regions, or makes barrel-aged beers; it’s because of how he makes his beers. 

“I’d say that 50% of my work is with the barrels, selecting, tasting and blending them,” he says. “Then 30% is taking care of the fruit, the orchards, and the harvest. And finally 20% is brewing.”

Lecomte makes just 30 batches a year, and is meticulous with his single recipe, using the same malt bill and process in every beer. The malt comes from a rustic barley he selected and sows in partnership with a local farmer. The hops are wild hops he picks himself in Burgundy, where he has found at least 12 good hop-foraging spots.

He never boils his wort, he says, though he doesn’t personally ascribe too much significance to that fact, contrary to what some of his fans believe.“When I started, a brewer told me that I had to be careful with wild hops, as they tend to be too astringent when boiled,” he says. “So I don’t boil them.”  

Considering how little hops he uses, it’s fair to assume that they’re only included so that he can legally include the word “beer” on his labels. When I ask the quantity of hops in each batch, he makes a small circle with his hands. “I tried my recipe without any hops in it, and to be honest, you can hardly taste the difference.” 

The recipe he uses results in a beer with no residual sugar and very low pH. In two words: Really acidic. 

“In the wine industry, collaborating with one another isn’t really a thing. My father never did it, or even thought about doing it. I’m amazed with how Simon is able to unite several industries around Ammonite, like winegrowing estates, distilleries, and cider houses.”

For Lecomte, brewing with just one recipe isn’t a lazy choice—more like the opposite. It showcases the power of blending and the barrels’ role in the process, he says. His fans claim that you’ll never taste the same beer twice from Ammonite, even if they have the same ingredients. Many of his beers are made with fruits, and others with cider lees or grape pomace; many more have no additions, their flavor profiles derived from blending and barrel-aging. Lecomte works with different kinds of wine grapes—aligoté, syrah, gewurztraminer, pinot noir, gamay, etc.—and every year the harvest offers something different, so each Ammonite beer is different. Just like wine. 

To that end, Lecomte works with several grape growers, like his former student Thomas Fayolle from Domaine des Martinelles et Aloès in the Rhône Valley. Their co-produced Cuvée Vinifera beers were made with grenache and syrah grapes.

“In the wine industry, collaborating with one another isn’t really a thing,” Fayolle says. “My father never did it, or even thought about doing it. I’m amazed with how Simon is able to unite several industries around Ammonite, like winegrowing estates, distilleries, and cider houses.”

The apricots grown by Fayolle also go into Ammonite’s fruit-beer range, Cuvée Vendange. “You see how much he cares about the products, making beer with the best ingredients possible,” he says. “He comes to the orchards to pick up the fruit himself, same thing during the harvest when he carefully selects the wine grapes.”  

When I taste the beer made with Fayolle’s apricots, I could easily mistake it for fresh fruit juice. The body is dense, velvety, and bright orange. I can almost imagine I’m biting directly into an apricot itself. Fayolle has a similar take. 

“I didn’t expect a beer where the fruit would feel so raw, subtle, and silky, not sweet but explosive, with a fine sour taste,” he says. “You can actually taste the apricot pit in the finish.”

The secret behind a true-to-fruit beer? Here in France it’s called vinification intégrale, or integral vinification. The brewer fills a barrel with fresh whole fruit, saturates it with carbon dioxide, and lets it macerate for eight days, draining the juice regularly. (This process is known as carbonic maceration, and is particularly associated with the wines of Beaujolais.) That juice is added to a barrel with a finished beer that has usually been aged one year. Lecomte turns that barrel once a week for six months, or even every day for the first few weeks, so that the fruit and beer can fully blend. They’re usually aged together for at least six months.

Carbonic maceration and integral vinification are winemaking techniques, and they are just two among several viticultural methods that Ammonite uses on a daily basis. Another is its solera barrel system, the only solera system in use at a French brewery today. 

This technique, most commonly used when producing sherry, is one of fractional blending. It requires some space, with several rows of barrels stacked on top of each other—solera means “on the ground” in Spanish, referring to the lower casks of the set. The Cuvée Solera made by Lecomte is a blend of every beer Ammonite has ever made: Every time he finishes one, he keeps a little to fill the upper casks of his system. The finished product is drawn from the lower casks, and the beer is transferred from one barrel to another, top to bottom, in a never-ending rotation.

“It’s a really time-consuming process, but a fulfilling one,” Lecomte says.

THE PERKS OF HYPE

When Lecomte put his first beers on the market in 2019, Ammonite immediately made a splash in French beer circles. He genuinely doesn’t understand why. “I don’t do anything that’s working in craft beer at the moment,” he says. “My beers don’t have high ABV. They’re not full of hops, or a big Imperial Stout. I don’t put eccentric adjuncts in them.” 

For Marie-Emmanuelle Berdah, beer sommelier and educator, that’s precisely why Ammonite blew up. “At the time, he was the only one in France with a brewery 100% dedicated to spontaneous beers,” she says. “He did what he wanted to do and not what others were expecting.” 

Lecomte believes that another reason might involve a certain brewery in Brussels. “People were curious to taste my beers to compare them to Cantillon, but some were a bit disappointed to realize it wasn’t the same thing at all,” he says. 

Berdah, however, doesn’t shy away from comparing Ammonite to the famous Belgian producer. “Even if their beers are ultimately very different, their approach to working with casks is similar, as well as not over-producing beers.” Another factor that contributed to the hype, she says: Ammonite was the first brewery in France to sell beers through allocations to its club members.   

Currently, Ammonite sells beer to about 300 venues, 80% of which are restaurants and wine shops, while 20% are beer-related. Julia Basso, marketing director at Lyon’s Brasserie Ninkasi, is one of Ammonite’s 100 non-professional allocation club members. The brewery’s club sales model, she says, wasn’t at all hard to understand.

“I buy Champagne the same way, as it’s much more common in the wine industry,” she says. Being an allocation club member, she adds, allows her to avoid the disappointment of finding that Ammonite beers have sold out every time she goes to her local bottle shop.

As of today, over 100 fans are on a waiting list just to join Ammonite’s allocation club. Lecomte says he finds this really frustrating. But it also offers him the freedom to choose his customers. Since he doesn’t produce a lot—just 200 hectoliters (about 170 barrels) per year—he numbers all of his bottles. That’s not to seem fancy or exclusive, he says, but to make it easier to trace and monitor sales.

At €14–28 (or about $15-26) for each 750ml bottle, Ammonite’s beers certainly aren’t cheap, and Lecomte is strict about retail prices. “If they don’t respect my terms and I see my beers at ridiculous prices in their shops or restaurants, I won’t work with them anymore,” he says. So far, he’s cut off some 10 vendors for price-gouging.

Whenever he ditches a retailer, he has no trouble finding a replacement. His system isn’t foolproof, however. Lecomte once saw one of his bottles being sold for €180 on the secondary market. He could trace the bottle back to the wine shop that sold it, but not the customer who bought it in order to flip it for a profit. 

“People who like what he does also like who he is as a person. Simon is a real chatterbox. All he wants to do is share his work with people. He’s really passionate and generous in that way.”

Ammonite’s success isn’t only due to the uniqueness of its beer or to its allocation model. Berdah says that Lecomte’s personality also plays a big role. “People who like what he does also like who he is as a person,” she says. “Simon is a real chatterbox. All he wants to do is share his work with people. He’s really passionate and generous in that way.” 

Lecomte is aware of that, and seems conscious of the fine line between appreciation and hero worship. One could argue that this is already happening. On Facebook, over 400 people have joined a group called Ammonite Enthusiasts, where they share their tasting notes and pictures of their visits to the brewery, or ask to share rides to Ammonite events. 

When Lecomte takes part in a beer festival—which he doesn’t do very often—it counts as an event in itself. He could probably pick up the phone right now and ask every major beer festival in France for a spot and get it, because lots of people would attend that event just for him, but he won’t. 

“I have a life, a family, a four-year-old son who tells me that I work too much, which kills me enough already,” he says. “Plus I don’t even have enough beers to sell anyway.”

Lecomte seems almost to coddle his customers, interacting with them on social media and even brewing some beers exclusively for special recipients. On Instagram, he regularly hosts Live sessions to talk about his latest releases, or show off the brewery and his future orchards. When Basso got her first subscription club purchase, she says, Lecomte delivered it himself. 

“When a restaurant or a shop orders beer in the amount of €400 from me, it’s nothing for them,” Lecomte says. “But when a recipient spends €100 or 200 on his allocation, it’s a big expense in support of my work. I owe it to them to be available and open.”

For Berdah, Lecomte shows the same respect to his customers that they show to him. “Simon has strong social values and he sticks to them,” she says. 

That has cost Ammonite some opportunities. 

“People are going to say that I’m dumb for this, but I said no to a collab with Hill Farmstead,” Lecomte says. “It was not long after some things were published online about the brewery, so when in doubt, it’s a no for me.”

Instead, he plans collaboration brews with other breweries from Burgundy like Vif in Beaune, or Independent House in Dijon. “I’d rather work with friends,” he says.

UNE BRASSERIE DE VILLAGE

Consciously or otherwise, Lecomte seems ambivalent about his success in several ways. He has his hands full with beer, but his foot is still holding the door open for wine to enter. He’s a famous brewer, but if you ask him if he’d rather drink wine or beer, he’s honest enough to answer wine. He despises being glorified, but he’s aware that his image is important to the brewery’s success. He doesn’t want to increase production in order to have enough time for his family, but he knows that the rarity of Ammonite’s beer only leads to greater demand. 

“Things have started to calm down a bit, but I want to kill the hype,” he says. That’s the next step: Lecomte is moving his brewery and part of his cellar to a new location this year. 

The new home for Ammonite is a huge stone building, some 10 times the size of the old barn, but with the same beautiful wooden beams, patina, and atmosphere. In it, Lecomte should be able to produce enough so that the waiting list for his beers will cease to exist, and visitors will be able to enjoy drinking beers at the brewery itself. “In here I could produce 1,500 hectoliters per year, but I don’t want to do more than 300,” he says. “I want to keep a family life.” 

In his future orchard, right next to the new brewery, cherry and apple trees offer more possibilities. As Lecomte walks through it, looking at the small vines he just planted, he talks about everything he’s planning to do here. You might expect that to include a bottle share or a tasting for geeks, but he starts by mentioning a vegetable garden for the Sennecey-le-Grand village school and an Easter egg hunt for kids. He wants to have a stage for bands from the area and plans to have activities in the vines for his son Marius—who also proudly wears a doudoune sans manches, just like his father—and his school friends. 

Ammonite is just what Lecomte wanted: a brasserie de village, or a village brewery. A small family-owned brewery in the countryside that serves as a gathering place for locals and as a host for community events. Before World War I, you could find one of those in almost every village in France. Nowadays, it’s a rarity. 

And it’s especially rare because of what Ammonite is—or even what Ammonite beer is. Is it beer? Is it wine? Is it fresh fruit juice? “If I wasn’t told it was beer the first time I tasted it, I never would have guessed what I was drinking,” Fayolle says. 

When you drink an Ammonite beer, it can even be hard to figure out just how it was made. But it’s actually quite simple: Whatever a winemaker does with grapes, Lecomte is doing with grain.

“For me, brewing was initially an experiment to see if I could apply winemaking techniques to beer,” he says. “A friend of mine told me ‘You don’t brew beer, you vinify grains.’ Maybe that’s a good way to describe what I do at Ammonite.” 

Words by Anaïs Lecoq
Photos by Maria Marchini