We return again to a beer we have only made one time prior, although that batch was quite heavily influenced by the draft-only Senescene dry hopped blend we made in the early years.

This beer is a blend of long-aged barrels of saison which were then heavily dry hopped and released young in the bottle with the intent that it be consumed relatively fresh. One of the primary constituent beers in this is one that we brew for To Contemplate Eternity (and sometimes blending into specific fruit beers). It is a beer we call "Sen/High" and it's essentially a spelt saison brewed with citrus/orange-forward hops at a slightly higher gravity, more akin to lambic gravity, which allows it to age nicely.

One of the many risks of aging beers for multiple years is that sometimes they go bad, and we had a sen/high batch which when we sat down to taste it at 18 months we ran into this with. In the tasting we found two really beautiful barrels and three which needed to be dumped. I rarely taste through barrels with anyone from outside the brewery, but that day we had a visitor, one of my favorite brewers in the country named Aaron Wittman, who was previously the head brewer at the ill-fated Break Even Beermakers. Dumping beer is just a part of brewing, and when you make barrel-aged mixed culture beer it is a regular occurrence, but having someone you respect come in to the building and sit at a table sampling some of your most abject failures is still a humbling experience. So in looking back on this, while it wasn't intentional, it was a fitting way to start this blend.

The blend that coalesced out of those surviving barrels incorporated some other well-aged barrels, including one of a new Amarillo-hopped wheat saison, and another slightly younger barrel of the beer that ends up being Monarchist, this barrel had been foudre-fermented for six months and then aged in neutral oak barrel for another half year.

The resulting blend was dry hopped heavily with a blend of mostly IPA-type hops. Usually our dry hops are more balanced and include classic or noble varietals plus more citrusy and floral "classics" that we sometimes balance with modern-ish IPA hops. But for this one I just went with three of my favorite punchy hops.

The result, like the first iteration of this beer, is a unique blend of IPA levels of dry hop, but with none of the murky and sweet backbone those beers have. Instead the foundation on which the hops sit is a soft but dry, effervescent and crushable blend of saison.