You don’t drink an Ale Apothecary beer so much as you time-travel through it—fermentation as séance, barrel as oracle, yeast as unruly poet. These are not beverages. These are wild, wood-whispered spells, brewed in the high desert cathedral of Bend by Paul Arney, Oregon’s funky-bearded fermentation mystic. Every bottle is a ritual, every pour a memory you don’t quite remember having: fir needles and folklore, spruce ghosts and wine-barrel hauntings, microbes whispering in ancient tongues. Today’s Peaks & Pints Beer Flight: Ale Apothecary gathers five of these strange and wonderful elixirs—each one spontaneous, reverent, unrushed, and wholly, gloriously alive. Sip slowly, dear drinker. The forest is speaking.
Peaks & Pints Beer Flight: Ale Apothecary
Ale Apothecary Spontaneous
6.8% ABV
Spontaneous Farmhouse is the wilderness incarnate—uncaged, unboiled, and beautifully unwilling to behave. A two-year oak-skulled séance of barley, rye, oats, and wheat, spontaneously fermented in the high-desert ether of Bend and then bottle-blessed with wildflower honey, it drinks like a dream whispered by ghosts of Belgian brewers and rogue orchard bees. Tart citrus pirouettes with rustic grain, funk flirts with finesse, and somewhere in the fizz, you taste the unspoken prayer of a brewer who lets the microbes do the talking. This is not your clean, controlled saison. This is wildness with a PhD. This is lambic-meets-forest-magic. This is Ale Apothecary.
Ale Apothecary Fierce Turtle
6.7% ABV
Fierce Turtle is not a beer, it’s an allegory of patience, of wildness restrained, of barrel-bound transcendence coaxed from the dusty wilds of Bend, Oregon by The Ale Apothecary’s alchemic hands. This oak-aged, bottle-conditioned marvel slinks across the palate with a sly, feral grace—tart as orchard ghosts, flecked with mandarin murmurs, kissed by the funk of forgotten cider cellars and the breath of sleeping Brettanomyces. It’s less a beverage and more a meditative crawl through time’s more puckered corners—an artifact unearthed from beneath moss and myth. Sip slowly. The turtle waits for no one, and it never hurries.
Ale Apothecary Sahati
8% ABV
Sahati is what happens when ancient Finnish brewing lore tumbles headlong into a moss-draped Oregon fever dream and emerges, radiant and resinous, from the barrel-charmed mind of Ale Apothecary. Brewed not just with Engelmann spruce tips but through them—literally filtered through a hand-carved lauter tun made from a 200-year-old spruce log—this wild ale is all forest breath and ancestral exhalation. Open-fermented, Pinot-barrel aged, and honey-kissed, it tastes like juniper smoke whispering over blackberries left out in the rain, a tart symphony of spruce resin, funky oak, and fermented folklore. Sahati isn’t just a beer—it’s an invocation. A reverent gulp of terroir. A sacrament to the gods of bark and barrel.
Ale Apothecary Ralph
8% ABV
Ralph is not a beer; it is a love letter to moss, memory, and the ancestral pine-sweat of Oregon’s deep woods, brewed with the sort of feral reverence that only Ale Apothecary dares. Named for brewer Paul Arney’s pharmacist father—yes, beer once came by prescription, blessed be—Ralph is a wild ale born of white fir needles, forest-floor whimsy, and open-oak fermentation, then aged in pinot noir barrels and sweetened ever so rebelliously with wildflower honey. It drinks like a forest dream filtered through a dusty apothecary cabinet: citrusy funk, balsam breath, ghost-cherry tang, and honeyed earth in slow, contemplative waves. If you’ve ever wanted to lick the soul of a rain-soaked Douglas fir while standing barefoot in philosophical awe—this is your moment.
Ale Apothecary Twist
11.75% ABV
Twist is not so much a beer as it is a whispered incantation in the language of wine, spoken through the delirious lilt of wild yeast and barrel dreams. At 11.75 percent, this Ale Apothecary rarity doesn’t flirt—it arrives cloaked in ghostly vineyard mist, breathes acid-bright truth into your gums, and vanishes like a half-remembered fever. Grown from the earth of Bend and fermented through time’s more stubborn corners, Twist Wine Co. (Batch 9.30.20) hums with white grape alchemy and sharp citrus recollection, less a wild ale than a Dionysian dare—boozy, elegant, and a little dangerous. It doesn’t care if you’re ready. It is.
LINK: Peaks & Pints beer and cider cooler inventory
