Wild About Ferments at Bar Spontana, the newcomer from the Mr West team

Story by Cara Devine. Cara is our Melbourne-based drinks writer. She is the co-owner of Goodwater in Melbourne and the face and talent behind the cocktailing YouTube channel Behind the Bar. You can email her at behindthebarchannel@gmail.com

Spontaneity is the spice of life, as they say, and the team at Bar Spontana have put both at the forefront of their newly opened venue in Brunswick, pairing a bar offering focussed on spontaneous/wild fermentation with spicy, regional Thai food – literally, take my money.

“It all just kind of came from passion really,” says co-owner Josh Hodges. He and business partner Caleb Baker are the brains behind Footscray venue Mr West, “a passion project about good booze in all of its glorious forms. The more that we scratched the surface about why we liked what we liked about that good booze, the more we found there was a common thread across a lot of categories of drink, be it beer or spirits or wine – that it was ones where they weren’t ‘pitching’ yeast but where spontaneous fermentation happens. You just get a much truer reflection of a sense of time and place; beyond the romance of a story, you’re really capturing the essence of somewhere.” And so the concept of Bar Spontana started to bubble.

Both Baker and Hodges have impressive hospitality resumes, and they’ve drawn from that to curate a list of minimal intervention wines, sakes, and (mostly) wild fermented beers (as Hodges points out, there’s no such thing as a spontaneous lager, so their entire bottle list is wild fermented and 4 out of the 8 taps, leaving some room for more classic styles). Spirits, though, have been trickier. “Obviously with how difficult it is to ferment grain products, they generally need a little bit of help with the more complex sugars, as opposed to rum which is straight sugar or fruit products which have yeast existing on the skin so they just do it themselves.”

They currently have an impressive selection of spontaneously fermented rums, agave spirits, and brandies. While whiskies and so on have proved more difficult (although they do have some), their aim is to have a 100% spontaneous spirits offering by the end of the year.

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Their cocktail list is headed up by Black Pearl alum and former Bartender of the Year Nathan Beasley, and is equally interesting. He continues the theme with house-made pickles and ferments using both ancient techniques and modern ones such as a Rotovap.

The Haribo Pickle uses a housemade rhubarb pickle and Calvados to perfectly mimic the sweet-sour more-ishness of our favourite sweets, while the Spro Tini combines lacto-fermented nectarine and Kenyan single origin coffee (which also undergoes a fermentation process) in a milk punch for a textural and juicy take which perfectly captures the beloved Espresso Martini while elevating it exponentially.

A list entitled ‘a snapshot of spontaneous fermented spirits and how we enjoy them’ featuring, for instance, Melbourne Sake Co sake and tonic and Mal Bien Espadin mezcal with passionfruit soda is a deliciously easy way to get into the spirit of the venue.

“The way we’ve designed it is that people can come in and enjoy it without being suffocated with the concept – they can just enjoy [the venue] without being overwhelmed with this kooky idea, but if they ask the questions the staff love talking about it because it’s what we’re passionate about…it’s kind of just integrated into every part of what we do, but you wouldn’t be able to tell – you’re not going to drink a wine or cocktail and say that’s obviously wild fermented.” – Co-owner Josh Hodges

Meanwhile in the kitchen, Chef Noom is cooking Thai food of a style and quality not often seen in Australia. A disclaimer on the menu reads, ‘There are many places you can find delicious green curry in Melbourne – this is not one of them. Our food is inspired by regional Thai food, ferments, preserves and family recipes. Most dishes contain chilli…some contain a lot of chilli’, a fact I can attest to after trying skewered betel leaves filled with oyster mushroom and a mind-altering burnt green chilli sauce! A cooling, skinsy viognier was just the thing to pair alongside though, and helped this Scot deal with the heat.

Other delicacies, such as house-fermented Esan pork sausage, seem tailor-made for the venue concept, but Hodges explains that getting Noom in the kitchen was a happy accident. “We never wanted to tie the kitchen down to any preconceived ideas that we had…we didn’t want to get into a predicament where we were pigeonholed into a genre of food because we’re not chefs.”

Hodges had worked with Noom at Cookie, who had then retired from hospitality, but over a game of pool, he expressed that he would come out of retirement for an opportunity to work with the Spontana team – spontaneous, indeed. ‘We’d never really considered Thai food with this concept, but the more that we looked into it, we realised it’s one of the most perfect pairings we could have done.’ Agreed!

As with all good bars with a strong mission statement, the concept at Bar Spontana guides their choices and, therefore, your experience, but in a subtle way. The service is warm and friendly, and they are happy to discuss nerdier aspects of the drinks with you should you please, but as Hodges explains, “the way we’ve designed it is that people can come in and enjoy it without being suffocated with the concept – they can just enjoy [the venue] without being overwhelmed with this kooky idea, but if they ask the questions the staff love talking about it because it’s what we’re passionate about…it’s kind of just integrated into every part of what we do, but you wouldn’t be able to tell – you’re not going to drink a wine or cocktail and say that’s obviously wild fermented.”

“We’re not about funky, we’re not about faults… we’re about showcasing excellent products that are made more excellent by the fact that they really represent and stand for something with how they’ve been produced in an artisanal way with love and care. There’s so much beauty and so much romance to it, and at the end of the day these products inevitably end up having more complexity and a deeper flavour profile because they’re not made with a cookie cutter, lab-produced yeast. They’re made from an environment, from an occasion, from a time and that’s hard to match. We’re not doing it because it’s a trend; we’re doing it because we wholeheartedly believe that it’s the most delicious way to make a drink with the most integrity and a way to honour a time and place.” As I said to him at the time, that, Josh, is perfectly said and will be my kicker.