Mortar & Pestle
Forest & Main - The Brewery

16oz can purchased from the fridge as a mixed four pack from the brewery for $20. The website says that this was released August 1, 2022 so that means that it is 6 1/2 months old.

Look: Pours a beautiful clear copper color with a fluffy beige head. Nice, steady streams of tiny bubbles dancing up the glass, reminiscent of a sparkling wine.

Smell: It has a lot of herbal notes along with aged hops and some funk. There's a solid malt backbone...could be some darker malts like caramel or Vienna malts in here. Mild citrus and fruity notes. Medicinal, peppery notes after swirling the glass. Subtle melon and bubble gum flavors that are coming through over time. Orange marmalade on toast after pouring the bottom of the can.

Taste: Delicious. This is a very interesting, tasty beer. It comes off like a relatively simple beer and it also tastes like something that was imported from France or Belgium. It's very classy. Up front, it has a very nice grainy, malty core. It finishes mildly to moderately bitter and very dry with grassy, peppery notes and orange rind and pith and watermelon rind flavors that build over time. Complexity is also increasing over time and the beer becomes more interesting after pouring the sediment. It's a very refreshing beer.

Feel: Medium plus mouthfeel. This beer is clean, crisp, and very dry. A bit chewy. It also has the perfect amount of carbonation.

Overall: I'm not sure if I have ever had a Bière de Garde before; if I have, it was a very long time ago when I may have had one of Jolly Pumpkin's versions of the style. This beer reminds me of Oxbow's Bandolier, which is a "country ale" malt-forward farmhouse style ale (characterized as a Saison). This is really solid. Bravo to Forest & Main and Free Will!

From the can:
Brewed in collaboration with Free Will Brewing Col, with barley and malted blue corn from Deer Creek Malthouse, using traditional Bière de Garde methods.

From the website:
Collaboration with @FreeWillBrewing. We’ve been pals with the crew of Free Will since before we both opened our breweries over 10 years ago. Gerard and Nate go even farther back, to when they were brewing Saisons and Biere de Gardes together at McKenzie Brewhouse. This beer is a take on style we’ve lovingly adored this whole time. We brewed this with a solid base of fine pale barleys from @DeerCreekMalt, performed multiple decoctions, boiled it for an extended time with aged and fresh hops, fermented it with our lager yeast at rustic temperatures, captured natural carbonation, and aged it cold. It’s a fairly complex process for a beer that drinks fairly subtle and simple, but that process lends a romantic depth you really can’t find otherwise (or so we tell ourselves). We find notes of dry Twizzlers, marble rye bread, anise and holy basil in the garden, orange cream, damp straw, and maybe an Oktoberfest party.