Burlington, WA 11/13/2024
Garden Path Fermentation is excited to announce the official release of The Garden Paths Led to Flowered. (8th edition) and The Wet Hopped Ship. (5th Edition).
The Garden Paths Led to Flowered. may be the closest thing we have to a house beer. It was the first beer we ever released (on Friday, July 13th 2018), and–besides The Easygoing Drink.–the beer we’ve brewed the most. Every edition of Flowered is a hoppy foudre-fermented golden ale, a tribute to some of our favorite Belgian beers, and this 8th edition was dry-hopped with pelletized Saaz from Yakima and whole flower Saaz grown down the road at Hop Skagit.
Some of our native yeast culture, which we began cultivating in 2017, has been banked at Imperial Yeast in Oregon since 2018, and this batch of Flowered was fermented using a pitch from that original culture. It is also our first beer brewed using a majority of LINC malt from Spokane, WA, after the closure of our local maltster Skagit Valley Malting.
The beer is bright, crisp, refreshing, with a clean Saison nose, plenty of hops on the nose and palate, and just the slightest hint of tropical tartness. It’s exceptionally easy to drink, especially for a 7%+ beer, and probably our favorite edition yet!
The Wet Hopped Ship. is our 2023 fresh hop beer. We hand-harvested Perle, Willamette, and Mt. Rainier hops with our friends at Hop Skagit on 9/15/2023, added them to hot wort in our coolship that night, pitched our house yeast in the other half of the batch in an open foudre, combined them the next morning, and after primary fermentation in the foudre, aged the beer in oak until it was dry-hopped with the same whole-flower hops and packaged almost a year later on 9/23/2024.
Our process for The Wet Hopped Ship. may be unconventional–the hops are as fresh as possible, going into the wort within an hour of harvest, but the beer takes quite a bit of time to age and develop a rounded flavor profile. The end result is a smooth beer with a floral, herbal nose and a refershing, lightly tart, citrusy palate. It may not be the same as other fresh hop beers on the market, but it is uniquely a Garden Path product.
Both beers 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 for The Garden Paths Led to Flowered is by Scout Caldwell, and art for The Wet Hopped Ship is 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.