I stumbled across a fascinating collaboration the other day. Apparently (I must have missed the memo), Banded Peak Brewing and Blind Enthusiasm Brewing recently got together to do a collaboration.

Now collaborations are all well and good. At worst it is a fun day for the brewers and the customer gets an interesting one-off. When at their best, though, a collaboration beer offers up a character from each of the participating breweries – in other words you can kind of taste each brewery in the beer.

But Banded Peak and Blind Enthusiasm went an extra step with their collab, an extra step straight into my beer geek heart.

Regular readers know that I love beer experiments and testing and challenging assumptions about beer flavour. I have done tests examining can vs. bottle vs. keg, the effects of aging, oxidation, glassware among other things.

So what did BP and BE do that caught my attention? They made two beer from one recipe (one at each brewery), swapping out only the yeast. The base beer is a light bodied beer with pilsner malt, some wheat and spelt and two rare French varieties of hops. One beer was dosed with a straightforward lager yeast to produce, basically, a Munich helles. The other was given a saison yeast to create, well, a Saison.

The results were quite stark, right down to appearance. The lager was bright yellow while the saison was hazy and slightly darker, forming a better head. The lager finished fairly dry but was a clean, easy-to-drink beer. The saison had a muddier, earthy note in its aroma and flavour. The peppery spiciness was subdued but present. The body seemed a bit thin for a Saison but still seemed heftier than the lager.

On their own neither beer really knocked my socks off, but knowing it was a fun experiment in isolating the effects of yeast made them noteworthy and notable. Very fun.

And to top it all off, I LOVE the names. The lager is called Banded Enthusiasm and the saison is Blind Peak. Simple but clever – both names could be a plausibly named brewery.

I would like to see more collaborative experiments in the future.