We are pleased to announce our latest beer — Jester King Hibernal Dichotomous. Over time our beer making has been increasingly driven by the seasons. We make farmhouse ales when the weather is hot and temperatures are conducive to fermentation, and we make spontaneously fermented beers and barrel fermented beers when temperatures are cold and conducive to overnight inoculation of wort and slow maturation in oak. We also use the ingredients that are available to us at various times during the year. In the spring we make beer with strawberries and blueberries, in the summer we use apricots and cherries, and in the fall we use grapes. Hibernal Dichotomous — our winter saison — is a beer that’s reflective of the ingredients that are available to us during the winter months.
Returning to the practice of bière de coupage or beer that is “cut”, Hibernal Dichotomous is a blend of young farmhouse ale (63%) brewed this past November, mature barrel aged beer brewed with lavender, rosemary and spearmint in November of 2012 (25%), and fresh pressed watermelon juice (12%). The watermelons we juiced for Hibernal Dichotomous came from this winter’s harvest.
Hibernal Dichotomous is 5.8% alcohol by volume, 12 IBU, 3.3 pH, 4 SRM, and has a finishing gravity of 1.000. Both the young and old beer in the blend were brewed with barley, wheat, hops and Hill Country well water and fermented with a blend of brewer’s yeast and microorganisms native to the ranch land where our brewery is located.
Hibernal Dichotomous will be released at Jester King this coming weekend when our tasting room opens at 4pm on Friday, April 25th. It will be available all weekend by the glass. Bottles to go (750ml, $14) will be available for sale all weekend as well. We have a sufficient quantity of Hibernal Dichotomous bottles that we do not plan to impose a bottle limit, at least not initially. 
Jester King Hibernal Dichotomous
Pressing Watermelon Juice
The artwork for Hibernal Dichotomous is by our artist Josh Cockrell. Here’s Josh in his own words discussing the concept behind the artwork:
This beer is an inspiration to explore and recognize the way we formulate the thoughts and beliefs we possess of nature, season and place. The following are the concepts that have come from this reflection and became the artwork for the beer.
We humans are dichotomous. The mind is the place of division. It makes the simple distinctions between hand and leaf. It divides embrace of nature and control over it. It separates this land and that and this season and the next. Our minds build these divisions and create these dichotomies. We apply them to the universe we are a part of. We divide the space around us with concepts like “place”. We create concepts like time and divide by season. We choose this division for sake of clarity and for understanding, but one land does not exist unattached to the next. Be it ocean laid atop it or words applied to it, is it not still connected by earth? Ask the same of Seasons. Are they rigidly segmented and unconnected? No, they are part of a continuum. The elements from one carry over into the next. The characteristics of these might shift but is it not still made of the same stuff?
The same is true of the relationship of humankind and nature. One is but an extension of the other. They are not opposing forces nor are they truly separable. So why not embrace and acknowledge this carry over, the trespassing over these blurry lines? This beer is the embrace of such concepts. It is an embrace of nature, and the definitions we give it as very part of that nature. It seems most honest then to offer up something of season not as a rigid and isolated segment, but rather as an earnest concept that moves onward as part of a continuum.
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