Jester King Brewery La Vie En Rose (Batch 10)

Jester King La Vie en Rose

The 2023 batch of Jester King La Vie en Rose is now out! La Vie en Rose is farmhouse ale fermented on the raspberries from 2023 Atrial Rubicite. As you can see from the photo, we still get a tremendous amount of fruit character and color from the second-use raspberries. This is also the first time we’ve canned La Vie en Rose.

The principle behind La Vie en Rose is to obtain a second extraction of fruit flavor and aroma from the raspberries previously used to make Atrial Rubicite. We noticed that after we made our first batch of Atrial Rubicite, the raspberries still had a lot of nice flavor and aroma.

We experimented with aging a pale, medium-strength, farmhouse ale in a stainless steel tank with the raspberries previously used in the refermentation of Atrial Rubicite. Over the course of about two months, the beer picked up color, flavor and aroma from the raspberries, as well as flavor and aroma compounds produced by additional fermentation.

As we’ve mentioned before, we’re most interested in fermenting fruit in a manner similar to how grapes become wine, rather than simply adding fruit or fruit flavoring to filtered and/or pasteurized beer. The former technique has the ability to create new and interesting flavors and aromas through the wonderful process of fermentation, whereas the latter is less natural and quite predictable.

“La Vie en Rose” literally translates to “life in pink”, a common French colloquial phrase meaning, essentially, life as seen through rose-colored lenses.