Some beers are built in a lab with a spreadsheet. Vert Frisson Saison was built in a forest. Stoneman Brewery, tucked away in the tiny Massachusetts town of Colrain, brews this one just once a year using spring nettles and evergreen tips harvested right off their own small farm, and the result is a saison that tastes like it actually came from somewhere specific rather than a generic ingredient list.
That sense of place is not an accident. Stoneman is, by its own description, one of the smallest breweries in the entire Northeast, run by a fellow who goes by Justin Korby, or simply "Stoneman" to the regulars. This is not a brewery chasing scale. It is a brewery that also partners with its neighbours at Freeman Farm for grass-fed beef, stocks fermented goods from Real Pickles, and treats brewing as one part of a much bigger, farm-rooted operation. When your beer list includes a Saison brewed with foraged nettles, you can tell the whole enterprise runs on a different logic than most.
The results speak for themselves. Vert Frisson picked up a 2024 Good Food Award, a genuinely tough prize to win in a category stuffed with farmhouse ales from breweries far bigger than this one. The nettles and evergreen tips lend the beer a bright, herbal, faintly piney complexity that classic saison yeast character plays beautifully against, landing somewhere between a forest walk and a properly funky Belgian farmhouse tradition. It is peppery, a little tart, dry on the finish, and entirely its own thing.
Because this is a once-a-year release, there is a real "get it while it lasts" energy around Vert Frisson. Beer CSA members do get a second chance, since Stoneman brews a follow-up batch for pickup the following month, but everyone else should treat this weekend as the moment to show up. The brewery is opening its doors for the occasion, with tours of what might genuinely be the smallest brewery in the Northeast, plus a chance to meet Stoneman and family in person.
If you have never had a beer built around foraged ingredients from the brewer's own backyard, this is as good an introduction as you will find. Vert Frisson Saison is less a recipe than it is a small patch of Massachusetts forest, bottled and lightly carbonated.