Cheers to the Pawpaw

Brewers across the region are using our native fruit to make intriguing and unique seasonal beers.

images Madeleine Hordinski

Picture this: You’re sitting in a brewery taproom and a glass of an unknown beer is placed in front of you. You raise it to your nose and smell notes of tropical fruit—banana, mango, melon—that instantly bring to mind images of equatorial climes, swaying palms, postcard beaches. You take a sip and those exotic flavors are joined by a tang of acidity, a bit of earthiness, perhaps even a twist of citrus peel. You smile as these sensory details offer you an escape from the familiar surroundings of the Midwest.

Imagine your surprise when the bartender tells you the fruit that provided that escape wasn’t grown on a Caribbean island or a South American rainforest, but just down the road in an anonymous-looking stand of trees off a country highway right here in Ohio. You’ve just discovered the pawpaw, North America’s largest native fruit.

Pawpaws are an enigma. All of this tree’s relatives in the Annanaceae family are tropical or subtropical, including Caribbean soursop and South American biriba (so evocative it’s sometimes called lemon meringue pie fruit), yet pawpaws grow only in temperate eastern North America. Despite its bold, summery flavors, it comes ripe in early to mid-fall. Perhaps most notably, despite being grown right outside our backdoors, it’s an elusive crop that can be nearly impossible to find, either in the wild, in stores, or at farmers’ markets. It’s treasured by devotees, yet largely unknown by many Ohio residents.

Pawpaws haven’t proven to be a commercially viable fruit (though attempts have been made). They spoil quickly, change dramatically across their short ripeness window, and damage easily. For these reasons, they’ve largely remained the quandary of foragers.

One type of business, however, is able to lock these flavors in time, offering one of the only commercial outlets for the pawpaw, and the only opportunity many Ohioans have to taste these hometown fruits. Across southern Ohio and neighboring states, craft breweries are working with foragers and growers to infuse the flavors of pawpaw into esoteric beers in a range of styles. Pawpaw beers are still a niche, but they have a devoted following, and offer intriguing avenues for unlocking this Midwestern taste of the tropics.

Rocking the Tropical Flavors
Urban Artifact in Cincinnati’s storied Northside neighborhood is known for brewing with fruit; in fact, it’s all they do. Focusing on fruited sour ales, Urban Artifact has built a national name by leaning heavily into the union of acidic fermentation and fresh fruit. There’s a farm in Washington State that grows a custom golden raspberry just for the brewery, they have a secret source on call who tracks down rare fruits from around the world, and they’ve worked with everything from hog plums to Cuban figs. Name a fruit, and they’ve probably made a beer with it.

The fruits Urban Artifact works with come from all around the world, but one of the most esoteric comes practically from their own backyard. The brewers here brew a pawpaw beer every fall, and have used a range of different recipe concepts to showcase it. Brewer Tom Collett writes these recipes, and he often uses other fruits to amplify the tropical notes of pawpaw.

“This year I used pawpaw, coconut, and pineapple, to kind of make a ‘pawpaw colada’ type of deal,” he says. “Last year we used banana and mango to lean into the tropical flavors that are already there.”

Urban Artifact’s beers undergo a quick lactic fermentation known as kettle souring, which creates a clean, simple tartness that complements many fruit flavors. They do, however, make very small batches of more complex, mixed-fermentation sour ales using a range of slower-acting microorganisms. These barrel-aged beers have a limited audience but showcase what’s possible with complex fermentations in much the same way as natural wine. Urban Artifact has used pawpaws in several small-batch beers like this, allowing time to be its own ingredient.

While sour beers offer a harmonious platform for the tangy-sweet pawpaw profile, brewers have brewed conventionally fermented beer styles with pawpaw as well. Jackie O’s Brewery in Athens, OH, has brewed several variations, but among the most popular has been Paw Paw Wheat. This 9% ABV wheat ale offer a gentle, boozy foundation to cushion the quirks of this wild fruit. The recipe was originally developed by Kelly Sauber, who now runs West End Distillery, and the beer has developed something of a cult following in the region.

“We make note every year of when the first call comes in for pawpaw beer,” says Seth Morton, head of operations at Jackie O’s. “I think it was the fourth week of June this year when somebody started calling asking when it was going to be ready. It’s a very culturally important recipe for the area.”

Both Urban Artifact and Jackie O’s get their pawpaws from Integration Acres in Albany, OH, one of the few commercial cultivators of pawpaws in the state. Owner Chris Chmiel helped found the Ohio Pawpaw Festival in 1999, which celebrated its 25th anniversary in September (2025). A beer garden was part of the festival from its early years and breweries around the state are invited to brew pawpaw beers to pour for the event. The festival includes a beer tasting and a brewers roundtable discussion.

“It’s pretty diverse. There have been IPAs, lagers, Porters, Hefeweizens, Saisons, you name it,” says Chmiel. “I think we really helped get the whole pawpaw beer thing going. I think one of the reasons the festival has been successful is there have been some really good beers that people enjoy.”

An Elusive Ingredient
Pawpaws are a difficult fruit to process for brewing. The flesh is soft and custard-like, and it’s filled with large seeds that are tough to separate from the pulp. Some breweries source their pawpaws from local foragers and undertake the laborious process themselves, while some let the folks at Integration or other farms handle this for them. Jay McGrath in the Miami Valley grows some pawpaws in his own small grove while foraging for others, and processes them into a puree himself. His pawpaws have been used in several beers at Branch & Bone Artisan Ales in Dayton, OH.

McGrath is known as “the pawpaw man,” a nickname he says even made it to his online dating profile years ago. He tells me pawpaws are his mission from God, and he’s always looking to spread the gospel. A surprise encounter with mulberries in a friend’s backyard over a decade ago—he didn’t know the ubiquitous purple berries were edible—led him to wonder what other delicious wonders the Ohio wilds had been keeping from him. He stumbled upon the pawpaw and found his purpose. He now has a half-dozen pawpaw cultivars in his personal food forest, along with 25 other fruit species.

What his own crop doesn’t provide, he forages in the wild. The trick is knowing where to look. “While pawpaw trees are plentiful, fruit often is not,” he explains. “You can pass a thousand trees in the wild without a single fruit to be found. But I have explored far and wide and now know when and where to find the elusive fruit.”

According to McGrath, pawpaw trees are easy to identify from their large, oblong leaves that are dark green during the growing season and then turn an easy-to-spot yellow in the fall. A good way to identify the tree is to smell the leaves—pawpaw leaves have a telltale diesel aroma. There’s a short window in September and October when the fruits come ripe, so timing is everything. McGrath says the Ohio woods are dotted with pawpaw saplings, but only trees above about 7 feet tall will flower, and it’s common to only find fruits on trees whose trunks are at least as big around as your arm.

“I hike until I see pawpaw leaves, and if the trees look small, I look deeper in the woods for the mother tree that seeded them,” he explains. “Then I look up.”

The fruits on mature trees are often too high to reach, so McGrath says to give the tree a light “shimmy” but not a hard “shake” (the latter will dislodge unripe fruits, which will not ripen once they fall). He gives some sound safety advice for this method: “Wear a hat and watch out for falling fruit.”

Pride in Our Native Fruit
McGrath has provided pawpaw pulp for Branch & Bone for several beers, including an IPA that harmonized its flavors with fruity hops, but McGrath’s favorite has been Scrumper’s Delight. The beer is a mixed-fermentation sour ale that spends an extended period in the brewery’s wooden foeders before being pulled off and aged for 6–8 weeks with the pawpaw, during which time the beer’s complex microbiome goes to work on the fruit’s sugars. The result is acidic, funky, and beloved, albeit by a relatively small group.

“We’ve had a couple people who are absolutely in love with it,” says brewer Justin Trhlin. “After a previous batch, a lady came in to ask about it and we didn’t have any left. She kept in touch and bought an entire case the next time it came out.”

At Little Fish Brewing, with locations in both Athens and Dayton, cofounder and brewer Sean White has brewed several beers with pawpaws, including a mixed-fermentation, wine barrel-aged sour ale called Notes from the Understory, a pawpaw Saison, and others. Perhaps the one that is closest to the brewery’s agrarian heart is Pawpaw Weizen. This Hefeweizen is a 100% Ohio-grown beer brewed with malt from Haus Malts, hops from Auburn Acres (or occasionally another Ohio hop farm), and pawpaw puree from Integration Acres. The German ale yeast used in the beer produces notes of banana and clove that dovetail nicely with the tropical flavors of the fruit.

White says visitors to the brewery’s taprooms connect to these beers and demonstrate pride in a native fruit that’s largely unknown to the rest of the world. “People in the taproom are always interested in a pawpaw beer,” he says. “If their friends don’t know what a pawpaw is, they’re excited to explain it to them.”

That pride extends to the brewers as well. Morton explains that while Jackie O’s is deeply rooted in its local culture, the brewery’s size prevents it from being able to use a lot of local ingredients, with pawpaws being an important exception.

“Our hops are predominantly coming from Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, our fruits from Oregon, and our grains from Montana or even intercontinental,” he says. “To be able to use something from here and tie the product to the place where the raw materials came from, it’s something that we don’t really have a lot of opportunities to do. To have the genus and species from the dirt that we occupy is pretty cool.”

Fruit beers are very popular right now, and craft breweries are always looking to stand out from the crowd by using new and unusual ingredients. Rather than scouring the globe, the next exotic flavor in your beer might come from much closer to home. Wear a hat, watch for falling fruit, and escape inside a glass of pawpaw beer.

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No. 57 / Feature

This article was originally published in a past issue of Edible Ohio Valley magazine. Subscribe to be the first to read each issue or order back copies while supplies last.

Winter 2024