Replete Trees: Volume 2
The Seed: A Living Beer Project

The winter solstice is very important. It signifies a point in the circle of life in which the direction of all things shift back towards growth from the necessary periods of death and dormancy that occupy that same cycle.

A favorite line from a favorite book written by the talented Hope Jahren reads, “Each beginning is the end of a waiting. We are each given exactly one chance to be. Each of us is both impossible and inevitable. Every replete tree was first a seed that waited.”

This is a deeply resonant thought that spawned a project of beers we hold within our “Replete Trees” series. These beers are singular iterations and unplanned happenings that present themselves in a way that beckons their own unblended, unadulterated moments.

We spent an evening, on a cold night, in the early months of 2021 sharing drinks, stories, and time with our pups with some of our favorite folks at Walking Bird Farms. They had a carrot crop that they were particularly excited about that was offered to us as the timing was not overly conducive to farm share sales. We brewed a beer with 100% Rabbit Hill Malthouse grown and malted grains (as we always do with our saisons) and a few hundred pounds of Walking Bird carrots. These carrots were a mix of roasted/charred, steamed, and raw, added at different points during the brew day, and this particular beer was eventually fermented and matured in a single oak cask with a mix of previously-wild yeast and bacteria.

The result is a super fun and playful beer exhibiting an earthy, fresh, bright nose of mature ferm character, alluded clean acidity, muddled citrus, and forest floor must. The palate follows through in a seemingly purposefully written tale of a passionate embrace between a late-summer chanterelle and the soulmate it unexpectedly encountered in a market-fresh ripe star fruit.

Pretty neat huh?