Wild

Calling a beer's ingredients "foraged" usually means someone bought wildflower honey and dressed up the copy. Wild is the rarer case where that word is literally accurate - Willibald's brew team went out to rare Charitable Research Reserve, a land trust protecting over 1,550 acres in Ontario, and picked the chamomile themselves.

The beer that comes out the other end is a saison built on that hand-foraged chamomile, canned in July at 5% ABV, made in collaboration with the reserve as part of Willibald's community fund efforts. Comparing a chamomile saison to actual chamomile tea is the obvious joke here, but Wild seems to have earned the comparison honestly rather than just leaning on a trendy floral note for the label. A land trust and a brewery is not the most common pairing in craft beer, and it's a more interesting reason to buy a saison than most.

It is available now at the farm retail shop, area farmers' markets, and through Ontario-wide delivery. A beer with an actual field trip behind it deserves at least one can before the chamomile season wraps up.