Burlington, WA 10/14/2024
Garden Path Fermentation is excited to announce the official release of The Spontaneous Ferment: 3-Year Blend (2023).
One of our biggest inspirations at Garden Path is traditional Belgian lambic: beer made without pitching yeast, fermenting spontaneously. Lambic production historically involves leaving hot wort overnight in a coolship to capture airborne yeast, aging the beer in oak for an extended period of time, and then blending. The most classic blend, known as gueuze, is a blend of young lambic (aged for one year) and older lambic (aged for two and three years), to enhance complexity and depth of flavor.
Garden Path’s location in northwest Washington State, with cooler summers and mild winters, is an ideal location for making spontaneously fermented beers. Our coolship program goes back to the very beginning of the brewery, with our first spontaneous brew taking place on May 1, 2018, two weeks after we opened. In winter, we lean into coolship production, taking advantage of our cool but not freezing nights. Because we are located in Washington and not Brussels, we’ve never called any of our spontaneous beers “lambic” or “gueuze,” and we try to respect the Belgian brewing traditions as much as we can while also embracing our unique climate and environment.
This beer, our second three year blend, consists of spontaneously fermented beer brewed on March 30, 2022, blended with barrels from the 2021 and 2020 winters. All were aged in oak in our cellar before packaging in kegs and 500ml bottles with a small amount of spontaneous beer brewed on March 20, 2023, for natural conditioning.
Making a beer like this requires lots of time and patience, not just for aging the beer, but also to let it condition properly. With that in mind, our kegs have been on draft in our tasting rooms and several outside accounts for a few months, but our bottles are only just now ready for release. They are now available at the Garden Path Fermentation tasting room, The Great Northern Bottle Shop & Lounge, and our online store, as well as through Walden Selections. We can’t wait to share them with you.
Art by Cass Graybeal Brown. 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.