Aaron Kleidon grabs a digging fork and a bucket. “We’re in luck. The chanterelles have come up,” he says. Kleidon and Marika Josephson head into the woods surrounding Scratch Brewing Co. to collect ingredients they’ll add to the brewing kettle within a few hours. Ryan Tockstein, the third of the brewery partners, monitors the mash. This beer starts with pale and caramel malts at its base, plus a good percentage of rye. A yeast strain with roots that go back to Belgium will give it a Wallonian farmhouse character. Scratch Brewing is located about 12 minutes outside the town of Ava, population 656, on two wooded acres in southern Illinois, where the prairie turns into rolling woods, then eventually the Ozarks to the south and west. The brewery opened in March, the principals occasionally pouring beer at festivals, otherwise serving almost all of it only at their tasting room on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. The brewery has an expansive patio, enclosed by a low wall made of rocks pulled from a creek in the woods; the view includes a small hop yard and a pizza and bread oven still under construction at mid-summer.

Hacking away at rose root, Kleidon explains it will add color and tannins to the beer. He began foraging in the woods around Ava when he was still in high school, using a plant book to identify varieties, collecting goldenseal, ginseng, and sometimes blood root, for a root buyer in nearby Waterloo, Iowa. “I have a plant mind,” he says. He sees one once and he remembers it.

Within hours, these chanterelle mushrooms will be added early in the boil and again at the end, providing an apricot aroma, earthy character and unique texture. Not everything the trio collects on any particular day goes directly into a batch of beer: Jars of dried plants sit on shelves above the taps in Scratch’s cozy tasting room. Unlike at larger breweries, replicating a recipe from one batch to the next is not a priority. This beer will simply be listed as “Forest Ale” on the menu, along with a list of the foraged ingredients.

The Scratch team prefers flavors that result from boiling wort over a wood fire, in a kettle once used for making apple butter. They add hops, wild ginger, rose root, spicebush, and chanterelles, tossing in more hops 20 minutes before the end of the boil, then steeping chanterelles, wild ginger leaves, and spicebush leaves for 10 minutes after raking out the fire. Scratch is a “nano” size brewery, with a 1.5-barrel (46-gallon) brewing kettle; they’d like to install a wood-fired brewhouse, with a capacity of 7 to 10 barrels, when they expand.

A bubble emerging from the “blow-off” tube that runs from a fermentation tank into a gallon-size mason jar of water signals yeast has begun turning wort into beer. Soon, activity will become furious.

The brewery’s tap handles are also foraged: They’re made from driftwood found along the Mississippi River, about 20 miles to the west. Scratch sells three categories of beers: familiar (brewed to style), fancy (fantastical, free-spirited, flummoxing, fascinating), and forest-foraged-fire beers brewed with ingredients cultivated regionally, foraged, or over a wood fire, like Forest Ale.

Forest Ale sits in a goblet on one of the slate tables in the tasting room. (Scratch salvaged chalkboards from local Pinckneyville High School to construct its bar top and tables.) Aromas and rich fruit flavors of plum and bananas blend seamlessly with earthy, spicy character. Firm bitterness accents a long, dry finish.