It’s back! Once again, Hop Culture Magazine has teamed up with our friends at Cellador Ales to produce The Carrot King, one of the coolest beer collaborations we’ve ever made.
The lambic-inspired, 6% ABV sour beer uses heirloom wheat from The Tehachapi Grain Project. And the hops are whole cone which Cellador founders Kevin and Sarah Osborne bought and aged themselves.
But perhaps the most striking feature of the beer (other than the incredible art of Hop Culture’s go-to artist, Sam Taylor) is its bright orange color. Cellador Ales bottle conditions all of their beers on honey from nearby Bennett’s Farm, and the practice inspired Kevin Osborne to experiment with other natural sources of sugar. For instance, their collaboration with Unseen Creatures — Alethia Ascended — features a combination of beet juice, pomegranate juice, and blood orange. And for The Carrot King? Carrots, of course. Approximately 200lbs of sugar-filled Nantes carrots for less than one barrel of beer.
Because of the response we got the first time we made the beer, we partnered with our friends at Tavour to make it more widely available. Check it out on the Tavour site and mark your calendars for July 31st, when bottles and glasses go live.
What Is The Carrot King?
The Carrot King is a collaboration beer made by Hop Culture and Cellador Ales. Born of experimentation with bottle conditioning on natural sugar sources, the beer uses fifteen gallons of carrot juice for every forty-five gallons of beer. For this reason, Osborne suggests rotating the bottle before opening to get all those delicious juices in suspension.
That’s right — The Carrot King is a carrot beer. With that said, it tastes more like a complex lambic than carrots, though you still get an amazing orange color.
Like most of the agricultural ingredients that Cellador uses in its beer, almost everything in The Carrot King comes from a family-owned farm. The carrots come from Weisser Family Farms and the heirloom grain comes from The Tahatchapi Grain Project.
Cellador packages the beer in 375ml bottles with art by Sam Taylor. We’ve also reprinted the matching glass for only the second time since Cellador released the beer in 2018.
Where Can I Buy The Carrot King?
Cellador initially released this batch of the Carrot King beer, without the matching glass, on their site with shipping available within California.
But, given the popularity and uniqueness of the last batch of The Carrot King, the Hop Culture and Cellador teams wanted to make the beer available to more people around the country. Although several sites offer the ability to buy beer online, we chose to distribute through our friends at Tavour.
If you don’t already have the Tavour app, definitely check it out. Not only does Tavour offer rare beer, but the company regularly helps build the craft beer community.
Tavour will be selling the beer and the glass on its website starting on July 31st. Only 650 bottles and glasses of the Carrot King beer are available. To make sure you get a chance to try this delicious beer, we recommend setting up notifications. To do this, download or open the Tavour app. Enter code “carrotking” on the promos page of the app. Allow notifications and you’ll receive a push notification to purchase the bundle when it becomes available!
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