Pretty Things Jack D'Or

"Jack D'Or" is a simple table beer, or "Saison Americain" as we're referring to it. We are not trying to coin a beer style – we’re just having fun. At PRETTY THINGS we don't brew styles per se. Instead, we re-imagine everything and leave the style numbers in books on the shelves where they belong. What that means is that while other people might be able to put our beers into a category, we have a hard time with it! Our beers are first and foremost creative beasts, not "types" of beer. Jack D'Or is the kind of beer Martha and I like to drink before, after and during a great meal. Heck, we'll drink this sort of beer any time.

On our honeymoon in France and Belgium we stashed quite a few cases of Wallonian beer into our trunk. Every night after setting up our tent we'd cook lardons and lentils on our camp stove and enjoy fresh "saison" under the stars. Inspired by some of our favorites saisons like Saison DuPont, but also DeRanke's XX Bitter, De Dolle's Arabier, and local table IPAs like Smuttynose, our Jack D'Or starts off with North American Pils, Vienna and Malted Oats (among others) and is hopped with a combination of four hops, finishing with First Gold, Nugget and whole leaf Cascade. Fermentation-wise we use a blend of three yeast strains to give Jack D'Or its refreshingly dry character. Finally, despite all of the spicy flavours in this beer it contains no actual spices - only malt, oats, sugar, hops and yeast. One more time: there are no spices whatsoever in Jack D'Or!

We reserve the right to make this beer better on a batch-to-batch basis, but we promise to keep you up to date with any changes that we make. That said, revealing too much of what we're doing takes away some of the fun, so we're not going turn this beer into a set of numbers and raw materials on here either.

The creature on the label is Jack D'Or himself, conceived and drawn by Dann. Far away in a small clearing in the woods of New England, ankle deep in the mash tun, he contemplates and perhaps even conjures a batch of beer. For those of you who are new to this, Jack is a grain of malted barley, but more than that: he is the unifying force behind all of the Pretty Things.