Autumn Rabbit
Atwood Farm Brewery

Well this is wild-- brewed with "dried big leaf maple leaves" and carrots with ginger and spices. It's full of flavors but the Saison yeast seems to keep it light and refreshing. Starts sweet and fruity and morphs into the drier Farmhouse taste.

Pours a beautiful dark orange coppery color with a persistent foam in the Orval chalice. Aroma is tangy with apples, pears, yams, and a hint of cinnamon. Taste is sweet vegetables and a really intriguing sap and syrup taste, if that's the maple.

This is quite a fascinating experiment and one of the better of the whacky brews I've had from Atwood. From the 500 ml bottle purchased at the Community Coop. New label is more artistic with the blue rabbit in the leaves.

Poured into a Fremont small snifter. Pours a medium to dark coppery amber with a fine two finger off white head with great retention and lots of lacing. Aroma of grainy malt, very earthy and spicy with notes of cinnamon and carrots. Flavor is slightly sweet grainy malt, summer herbs, sassafras, faint sweet carrot; earthy and spicy. Medium bodied with nice moderate creaminess and sharp carbonation. This is way better than it should be. This is the second carrot ale in the Northwest in just a few weeks (carrots!), after Three Magnets / Urban Family's deliberately idiosynchratic Hoperation (P)haze Purple. That IPA was oddly enjoyable, but not something that I would hunt down. Autumn Rabbit, however is right in the sweet spot for a grainy saison / biere de garde, but with interesting autumn inspired flavors that start well and finish very flavorfully. There is a mild carrot flavor here, but I would not have identified it if I hadn't been looking for it. It's unexpected that carrot would mesh so well with both hazy IPAs and farmhouse ales, but I'm a believer. Looks, smells and tastes great. This is a really pleasant saison that I will look forward to drinking again. I wasn't sure about this one from the label, but I know that Atwood's farmhouse ales are almost always a pleasant surprise; I'm glad I picked this one up.