Burlington, WA 7/29/2024
Last weekend, Garden Path Fermentation released the newest edition of The Easygoing Drink. on draft and in 16oz cans.
The Easygoing Drink. is our take on a grisette, a style of light, relatively low-alcohol, easy drinking beer, that originated around the eastern Belgian city of Liège, where it was the choice drink for miners in the region. Our interpretation is dry, effervescent, and lightly tart with a gentle touch of herbal bitterness and spice, making it the choice drink for patios and picnics.
We get classic saison-like aromas invoking panzanella crackers, whole green peppercorns and freshly sanded wood, with notes of bright lemon curd and lemon balm on the finish. This batch of Easygoing is 3.8% ABV and was brewed with Washington-grown pilsner and vienna malts, malted and raw wheat, Cascade and US Tettnanger hops, and fermented in an open-top foudre with our house mixed culture, then keg- and can-conditioned using local blackberry honey. In addition to being available at Garden Path Fermentation in Burlington and The Great Northern Bottle Shop & Lounge in Bellingham, The Easygoing Drink. is also available for offsite distribution in 30L & 1/6bbl kegs and cases of 6x4x16oz cans.
We’re especially excited for this release of The Easygoing Drink. as it marks a number of firsts for Garden Path Fermentation. It’s our first beer overseen from start to finish by Head of Fermentation Katie Cochrane, who joined our team in March. It’s also our first beer brewed with Washington-grown grain from LINC Malt, a phenomenal producer in the Spokane Valley that we’re excited to build an ongoing relationship with. Additionally, this is our first beer brewed with a banked yeast culture. This is not, however, a foray into commercial yeast, but rather a return to the early days of Garden Path Fermentation. During our initial site search in 2017, we gathered flowers, leaves, and berries in order to capture the native microflora of the Skagit Valley. After its first cultivation, we submitted our native yeast culture to a local yeast lab to preserve for future use. After 100 generations of brews, we reintroduced this original preserved yeast back into our cellar to return somewhat to our initial house character.
With fresh yeast and fresh additions to our team, we’ve got lots more in the pipeline to follow on the heels of this batch!
Notes from the cellar:
It’s a funny place to be in, taking over an operation that’s existed for a few years but one that specializes in “nontraditional” styles based loosely around preindustrial traditions. This batch of The Easygoing Drink., a Grisette made with our own Garden Path Fermentation house culture, is light, crisp, tart, and in many ways similar to previous batches we’ve made. It’s a rerelease of a flagship beer, which seems unromantic at first. But it’s a chance to dig a little bit into the guiding ethos at Garden Path and to think on a different scale.
Grisette, as a style, is a lighter saison or farmhouse beer with vague history of being made for Belgian miners working along the French border, sold by working class young women after whom the style is named. This specific beer history, if I’m being honest, is poorly supported and relatively unimportant. Looking closer, though, there’s the shift from agricultural to early industrial communities at play, with faster production times necessary to keep up with growing populations and demand, but how does that reflect in the actual flavors experienced in the resulting beer? When making beers in “forgotten” styles, you’re working off of descriptions with no chance to taste the original drink and learn directly. But there’s lessons to be gleaned from the larger cultural movements of the day, the context clues hidden in the larger narrative of the changing ways we eat and drink. For taste, though, we can only interact directly with the beer made by our friends, neighbors, and the folks who came before us. I was fortunate enough to taste some earlier iterations of The Easygoing Drink. and to see the evolution of both the beer itself as well as the house polyculture as it changed from generation to generation and brew to brew. I found myself most drawn to an earlier iteration of Easygoing and wanted to bring the beer back to that profile–less acid driven, at least up front, and a little drier and saison-like. It only made sense to pull from the house yeast culture that had been preserved years ago.
This will definitely see some gentle evolution with each new iteration. I look forward to exploring that with all of you!
Katie Cochrane
Art by Cass Graybeal Brown. Layout/design is by Paul Marko. Photo by Katie Cochrane
About Garden Path Fermentation
Located in the beautiful Skagit Valley in Northwest Washington, with its uniquely fertile soils and cool, temperate climate, Garden Path Fermentation is one of very few producers in the world that’s able to make beer, wine, cider, and mead, all using ingredients sourced from our own backyard, and may be the only one to do so using only native yeast fermentation.
Our production process draws on old-world brewing and winemaking techniques from a variety of traditions, which we reinterpret and adapt to take advantage of our abundant local resources, including Skagit-grown and locally-malted grain, Skagit-grown fruit, much of which we tend to ourselves, locally-cultivated honey, and organic hops from our friends’ nearby farm. Fermentation takes places in oak barrels of varying sizes, including a large, open-top foudre, and each unique batch is hand-blended to taste and is a singular expression of time and place that we can never recreate.
A garden path is a beautiful way to get somewhere you may not have expected to go. Our products–the results of careful selection, blending, aging and curation–will take you on what may be an unanticipated journey that we hope you enjoy!
Visit gardenpathwa.com for more information or follow us on Instagram and Facebook @gardenpathwa.
Please let us know if you are interested in republishing this release, require any additional materials or have any questions.