Burlington, WA 7/29/2024
Garden Path Fermentation has released a musical collaboration (This is a) Crush Story on draft and in 750ml bottles.
Amber has had a crush on the band Too Much Joy since she was in high school, and there was no way she was going to pass up the opportunity to make a beer with them. In the spirit of collaboration–lead singer Tim Quirk’s love of crushable lagers, and our love of crushing things during harvest season–we added spent Pinot Noir pomace to a batch of table beer, let those guys hang out for a while, and then added whole cherries to round out the base. In every possible sense, this beer is a Crush Story.
If you don’t know Too Much Joy, you probably weren’t tuned into the east coast alternative music scene in the 1990s, and that’s okay. The band was formed in Scarsdale, New York in the early 1980s based on the members’ mutual love of punk, and their sound, especially over the evolution of nine studio albums in 35-ish years, is hard to pinpoint. Tim has called them “Randy Newman fronting The Clash,” but if you create a Too Much Joy Pandora station, you’ll also get some Madchester, some They Might Be Giants, some Ramones, some Go-Gos, and some Kinks. This is a band that has been sued by Bozo the Clown, arrested for playing 2 Live Crew covers in Florida, and detained by the Secret Service at a show in DC (Amber was there for that one back when she used to be cool). They’re hella fun.
The release date for (This Is a) Crush Story was Saturday, September 14, and to celebrate our collaboration, we were stoked beyond belief to be able to host an acoustic show featuring Wonderlick–Tim Quirk and Jay Blumenfeld from Too Much Joy—at The Great Northern Bottle Shop & Lounge in Bellingham, WA.
Layout/design is by Paul Marko. Photo by Chris Carley.
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.