Three years since the last Filaree blend we return with our best blend yet. It is always ultimately satisfying to me when we can take a beer we have made previously and do a new version that builds upon our previous work.

Filaree is made with aged saison refermented on organic plums grown and harvested by hand by our friend JC who operated Filaree Fruit in Okanogan, part of the OPMA farmers coop. When we make this beer we take ALL of the plums JC gives us and we put them onto beer, so the blend of fruit is less our design and more just what the orchard provides. Several of JC's trees, specifically the Shiro (in the old days released as Time/Eternity) and the Elephant Heart (Nothing/All) are trees that are probably 50+ years old and whose production varies dramatically year-to-year. We could get 600 pounds or we could get nothing.

The entire set of varietals in this, same as '22 is: Santa Rosa, which is an idyllic red-skinned orb with beautiful golden flesh. Elephant Heart, which is a deep almost purple skin with a blood red flesh and pleasant spice. Shiro, a small golden plum which becomes lightly translucent as it ripens and becomes more tropical. Green Gage (also Greengage), a beautiful green-tinged yellow plum that has sublte watermelon and lime zest aromas. And lastly, Howard's Miracle (aka Howard's Dream) which is a red-blushed gold plum that smells like a pińa colada.

With the 2022 blend I remember saying to Aaron that I felt like the ideal blend would be if the ratio of Elephant Heart and Santa Rosa were reversed. The Elephant Heart, which there was twice as much of in '22, is one of my favorite plums. It is very intense, so it tends to bully the other more subtle plums in the blend. In 2025 the orchard engineered this and we got a small amount of Elephant Heart and a larger volume of Santa Rosa. In addition, something we've never seen happened and many of the pits split in the tank during refermentation, exposing the vanilla-ish noyaux to the beer and extracting its floral and creamy flavor and aroma.

This blend has a lot of components, but contains large portions of a noble-hopped spelt saison, as well as a one-off beer we brewed that is a Grails-variant with different, more tropical, hopping. It also incluces a bit of the beer that ended up as Monarchist and some Senescence from Sen 36. The resulting beer is, like most of these red/white plum blends we do, a strawberry bomb, with a balance of soft spelt body and crispness from the zippy phosphoric-esque plum acidity. For fans of the Collins Family blends, happiness, crushability, and feeling like every day is summer.

Bottling date: 12/11/2025
ABV: 5.80% ABV
Conditioned with: Organic sugar.
Cellar: This has been conditioned in the bottle for 6+ months prior to release and is drinking great. It should continue to drink well for several years, but I don't think aging will improve it significantly. Best before 2029.