West Coast Famhouse Ale brewed in collaboration with Dageraad Breiwng, Charles Faram, and Lallemand Brewing

Our goal was to create a beer that is dry and refreshing, merging rustic esters with classic and new-era hops. We weren't really sure if we were making a Belgian Oat Pale Ale, or an estery White IPA, or something else entirely. Lucky for me, the Dageraad folks also enjoy putting a recipe together and seeing what it tastes like before deciding what style box it fits in!

We landed on a grain bill with flaked oats, malted oats, and flaked triticale (a wheat/rye hybrid grain) backed up by our favourite Bohemian pilsner malt.

We teamed up with our pal Azlan from Charles Faram (former best boy of Main St Brewing!) to source some awesome hops. The first is a nice lot of Cascade, full of all the citrusy grapefruit and pine that you'd expect in a classic west coast beer. It's one of my favourite hops, probably because it was so prominent in the era when I first got into craft beer.

The second was a new one for me - a hop called Pink, developed in Idaho by @jacksonhopfarms (the same folks who developed Idaho 7!) and named for the pink flagging used to mark its rows in the field. Pink seems like a really cool varietal. It's got a lot of the potent stonefruit and citrus you would expect from new world variety but it also has some really interesting other characteristics in there - I get notes of strawberry and something sweet, like vanilla-infused cream. Cool stuff.

For yeast we looped Lallemand into the collab and utilized their Lalbrew Farmhouse strain. This one is neat, it's a non-diastatic farmhouse strain which means we can run it through our regular pipeline without infection concerns from true saison yeast. We fermented warm with a big freerise which led to notes of black pepper, a bit of clove, and lots of fruity esters. It leans more towards the Belgian-style of saison, which is perfect for a collab with BC's finest Belgian-style brewery!