The History of Cherry Blonde

by | Nov 1, 2018

A glass of Ignite Brewing Co's Cherry Blonde blonde ale.
The majority of my home brewing experience was focused on the technical aspects of brewing, brewing classic styles and trying to learn as much about the brewing process as I could.  That’s what fascinated me the most.  The ingredients were kept simple; water, barley, hops and yeast.  But I would occasionally get requests for a fruity beer or something with vanilla, coffee, chocolate, etc.  Maybe I didn’t go down the fruit or other additives path due to my philosophy of keeping additions real and natural.  And in turn doing so is a lot of extra work!  I’ve never been one to use artificial flavors or extracts.  That still holds true at Ignite Brewing Company.  We will always strive to use real, natural ingredients.

Knowing we had a good blonde ale recipe (currently our Matchstick Blonde), I began thinking what could be done with that as the base.  I’ve always leaned toward the tart side when it comes to beers rather then sweet.  After brainstorming a bit with Jason, he said a buddy of his lives in northern Michigan and could get us some dry tart cherries.  It sounded great to me, so we fired up the kettles and brewed some blonde ale then added the cherries post fermentation. That first batch was AWESOME!  It went on to win a gold medal in the Wizard of SAAZ homebrew competition and competed for Best of Show.  We knew we had a good beer at that point and the Silver medal this year at the Great American Beer Festival solidified that.

I hope you enjoy this beer as much as we do, and that you’ll join us for our First Tapping on Thursday, November 8th!

Cheers!
Adam