The cherries are from the Okanagan, grown by Steve & Dan's Fresh BC Fruit, and there were hundreds of kilograms of them. What the brewery cannot tell you is what variety they were. Blind Enthusiasm's own notes describe them as sour cherries of unknown heritage.

That is an unusually honest line for a category that normally trades on provenance, and it turns out not to have mattered much. This is the second vintage of Fruitful Pursuits: Cherry, and the brewery says it is the second year running that the beer has been named World's Best Kriek.

The base is not a beer that was brewed with cherries in mind. Blind Enthusiasm blended barrels that had already spent one, two and three years in spontaneous fermentation, then refermented the blend on the fruit for roughly two more months. The cherries arrive last, into something already finished, and the sugars in them kick off a second fermentation that leaves the beer drier than the volume of fruit suggests.

Kriek is the Belgian name for exactly this idea, and the style has a long history of doing it with whole cherries, stones included. The brewery describes ripe cherry, baking spice and marzipan flavours here, supported by a tart, juicy acidity. That marzipan note is a recurring feature of cherry beers generally, and it is usually traced back to the stones rather than to anything added.

The brewery also promises a striking colour: stunning ruby red, in its words, which is the one claim on the list a drinker can check before tasting anything.

The bottle was filled in June 2025 and has been conditioning since. At 7.5 percent in a 750ml bottle, this is closer to a wine format than a beer one, and the acidity points the same direction - toward a table rather than a couch. It would sit comfortably next to duck, or a cheese board with something firm and salty on it.

Fruitful Pursuits: Cherry 2024 was poured at Barrel Fest and is available now through the brewery's online shop, with Canada-wide shipping.

Editor’s Take

Craft beer has spent a decade learning to talk like a wine list. We get the farm, the elevation, the row number, the name of the man who drove the truck. Provenance is the whole pitch. So I have enormous affection for a brewery that went to the Okanagan, bought hundreds of kilograms of sour cherries, and wrote down, in public, that it does not know what variety they are. Cherries of unknown heritage. It is the most relaxed sentence in Canadian beer.

And then, by the brewery's account, the thing went and won World's Best Kriek. Twice. There is a lesson buried in there about how much of the provenance conversation is doing real work and how much is decoration, but the better reading is simpler: somebody tasted the fruit, decided it was good, and got on with it. Two months on the cherries, three barrel ages underneath, and nobody in the room troubled to ask the trees for identification.

Source & Editorial

JollyPint independently prepares release articles using information published by breweries through newsletters, websites, and other official public communications. Brewery-supplied descriptions and tasting notes are reported as provided, while editorial context is added by JollyPint.

Fruitful Pursuits: Cherry 2024 Runs on Cherries of Unknown Heritage

Hundreds of kilograms of Okanagan sour cherries went into barrels that had already been fermenting for years. The brewery says the result has been named World's Best Kriek two years running.

Source & Editorial