You can’t ferment in the cold

Every plan is a small defiance of time. Until time runs out.

Our last summer in Florida enveloped me like a boiled blanket, drenching me in sweat and impatience. It burned every last lingering desire to exist in that godforsaken, endangered state out of my body.

The promise of paradise had matured, aged and then curdled before our eyes; a warm hug that lingered too long, tightening into suffocation.

It was time for four seasons. Time to tear ourselves from our chosen family and return to the ones who made us. Time to go home.

Not just for the weather. For roots. For time we didn’t realize was running out.

And so, back to New York we went.

No hard feelings.

In Buffalo, for the first time in 14 years, we watched the world turn. Summer burned a beat longer than we remembered before fading into an autumn flush with fresh produce and technicolor leaves. Then winter burst from the skies, blanketing the sidewalks and dampening our desire to be outdoors.

Maybe we were frozen, but at first, the cold felt novel. Then our neighbor and our landlord noted that it had been snowing for 40 days and 40 nights. That’s when it finally settled into our bones, and we began to wonder what we had gotten ourselves into.

I had plans to keep. For years, as a transplant in Florida’s strange soil, I imagined my passions would erupt upon touching down in my native terroir: Big family meals, cooked in a dynastic kitchen — the purest way I know to say “I love you.” Hikes in nature with peaks and valleys and rivers of more than sweat. And, most of all, brewing beer with my family, passing stories like bottles, in the cool summer shade of the yard where I spent endless summers dreaming.

With each residual day in Florida, my yearning grew stronger, and by the time the boxes began piling up, I found my mind had fled the state even while my body remained. Florida’s long season was finally coming to an end. The next one would awaken like spring.

And as we landed in our new-old home, it did awaken. But not quite how I had planned.

At first, the cold felt like a welcome return. Then, it smothered my hopes. Toddlerhood, with all its battles over boots and mittens, complicated our plans to enjoy the outdoors. October’s rain stiffened my fingers and made brewing outside impossible. I threw myself into cooking. Then life pressed in — remote work, parenthood, bouts of illness.

And then, in early February — the coldest, darkest, loneliest part of winter — my phone rang at 7:30 a.m. My mom’s name lit up the screen. And I knew.

My dad died.

He left us in the middle of the night. She was at his side. I wasn’t there. I had spent the evening with friends, sharing beers and watching our children play, then limping home as a surprise snowstorm once again quieted the roads and slowed the metabolism of the city.

As she told me he had gone, I listened, catching the sobs in my throat before they could escape. We talked for more than 90 minutes, circling around the facts, orbiting the loss.

Why the hell did I bother moving back if I wasn’t there when I was needed most? What did my big ambitions about family amount to? What is cooking or brewing or enjoying temperate weather in the face of such loss?

But we’re still here. And spring will come, whether we’re ready or not.

---

Before everything else — before the move, before the winter, before the loss — I fell in love with saison.

It started, as many things do in Florida, at a shuffleboard court.

It was 2013. I was 25, my horizon wide open, still running away from family to figure myself out. The opposite, in every way, of the waning Florida years that would follow. St. Pete had just passed a law allowing breweries within city limits. Immediately, three were announced. It would take time for them to select locations, hire staff, secure equipment and dial in recipes so, in the meantime, they began hosting pop-ups at local hot spots.

There, behind a folding table, two men poured samples for shuffleboard players passing by, tangs and biscuits in hand.

I sampled both beers. One changed my life.

The men were from Green Bench Brewing, which would soon become my favorite brewery. The beer was, I think, an early version of Saison de Banc Vert. It was peppery, bitter but not overly so, dry and effervescent. It tickled the tongue and then lingered on the palate like bonfire smoke on a hoodie from the night of your first kiss.

It wasn’t my first saison, but it was the first saison I remember. The one that mattered. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was my first step on a new path.

I became a regular at Green Bench over the next few years. It was a place I met with my friends before weddings, after work meetings and during unfathomable moments, like the day our friend Jamie died. Keeley — exclusively, at the time, a wine drinker — ordered her first-ever beer there. I went home and bought her engagement ring that evening.

There, the saison was always flowing. Beemo. Les Grisettes. Saison de Banc Noir. Bench Beer. Honey Saison. Stead Ale. And, of course, Saison de Banc Vert.

Through my mid-to-late 20s and early 30s, Florida was a backdrop of Gatsby-esque abandon. And Green Bench saison was the always-playing symphony.

But, like any enthusiast who becomes obsessed, I soon realized drinking it wasn’t enough. To love something meant I had to understand it, and to understand it, I had to learn how to make it.

---

My goal was to make not just a saison, and not just a great-tasting saison, but the dream saison. I nailed it on my fifth try.

It was called Porch Beer. It was a straw-pale beer that crackled with lemon, pepper and fresh-baked sourdough. It was the summit of a quasi-scientific process in which I brewed a recipe, tasted the result, changed a single variable and then brewed it again.

It hit every note I had been chasing and kept me on a manic high for weeks.

But it wasn’t enough. It didn’t mean anything; not in the grand scheme of the saison style and not to me.

I had spent years trying to perfect a saison, and yet the best ones I’d ever had weren’t perfect at all. Green Bench’s brewer kept tweaking the recipes, always aiming for a greater greatness. My favorite saisons from Europe were alive — tied to time and place, changing with the land and the seasons.

Maybe that’s what I had been missing. Not just in beer, but in everything.

I won’t retell the history of saison here. The short story is that it was probably first brewed in the 1800s in Wallonia, the southern half of Belgium, as a thirst-quenching drink for field workers. Styles of beer are sort of arbitrary and the story could be the result of romantic marketing from the Belgians, but one constant of historical saison recipes is that brewers often used what they could.

Good spelt season? In it goes. Wheat tasting great? Might as well add some. Neighbor sitting on a hop surplus? Better use them before they go bad.

At that time, global grain and hop companies didn’t exist and anti-spoilage techniques were in their infancy, so ingredients were mostly local and often fresh.

That meant saison was a reflection of both the place where it was made and season (or, in French, “saison”) in which it was brewed.

My ingredients came from where the majority of American brewers, amateur and professional, get theirs: big companies that source raw materials from all over the world. Those ingredients come with some provenance — I knew my hops came from Washington and my grain came from across the United States — but they are generally anonymized and homogenized.

That makes good business sense. Brewers who order 2-row malt from Briess or Weyermann don’t want variation. They want their flagship IPAs to taste the same, spring through winter, year after year.

But what if beer was more like it was before the ingredients became commoditized, like it was in the days of saison’s founding? That’s the thought that wouldn’t stop buzzing in my mind as my supply of Porch Beer dwindled.

What if beer changed with the seasons and the years in pronounced ways? What if it reflected the land in which the ingredients come from, land that can suffer droughts or floods or years with perfect harvests?

We don’t have to guess. We have wine.

Wine has always understood time and place. It marks the year, the earth — every bottle a timestamp of what was and what will never be again.

We do this with lives, too. A name etched in stone. A set of dates: 1960–2025. As if two numbers could capture everything that happened in between.

Beer forgot. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

---

I arrived in New York with more than just a U-Haul full of belongings. I came with a vision: brewing beer the way it used to be brewed, deeply tied to the land and the seasons.

The first batch should have been easy. I’d brewed plenty of saisons before. But here, everything fought back.

The cellar was too cold. The air was damp, the smell of mildew creeping in like a warning. The bottles had to be sanitized by hand, a slow, painstaking process without a dishwasher. Even the yeast hesitated, sluggish in the unfamiliar chill.

I’d like to say I overcame these issues with grit and determination, but the answer was a depressingly common one for these times: I needed to invest more. A heating belt. An electric boil kettle. Small concessions to make brewing possible in a place that felt like it was pushing back against me.

But no amount of gear could fix the real problem: I had spent years picturing this moment, and reality refused to match the vision.

I thought I was returning to something. But nature doesn’t care about our nostalgia. The cold wasn’t an obstacle. It was a reminder that time moves forward, indifferent to what we want from it.

So I thought. Bought. Experimented. Tried to let go of the polished version of this I had built in my head.

The first beer of Tinear Seasonal went into bottles in November. It wasn’t perfect, but it was mine. Not just a saison, but a conversation with the land, the weather, and the time I found myself in.

It is the first of what I — perhaps foolishly, I see now — plan to be many. But the only one that will ever taste exactly like this.

---

Tinear Seasonal is not just a makeshift brewery in my family home. It’s an experiment in patience. In devotion. In enduring. It’s tied to beer, yes, but also to food, to the land it comes from, and to the generations of family who made that land meaningful to me.

Tinear is a place for ghosts.

My grandparents bought this land. My parents kept it alive. Now, my son runs across the same lawn where I once played.

In that same place, on a cold February Sunday morning, I stood in the only place that has been home for my entire life and realized: I had just lived through my last day with my old man.

Please take care of yourself.

We had a complicated relationship. We disagreed on politics, religion, my profession, history. We challenged each other. I called a détente on discussing fraught issues, which he dutifully ignored. But his love for us was bigger than his body would allow. He tried to keep up. He drank beer with me when I visited. He got down on the floor to play with Augie. He was always encouraging — never “you can’t,” always “why not?”

He was the first one up every Christmas, too excited to sleep any longer.

He texted too often — always in all caps — to tell me he missed me.

He cried at “The Cutting Edge” and “Pride and Prejudice” and when the pets got sick.

When I moved home after 14 years away, he had 164 days left. I didn’t know. We moved home for him.

I hope he knew how much I loved him.

I think he did.

I miss him so much that I sometimes have to hold back vomit when I try to fathom he’s gone. I miss him.

---

We endure weather. We endure death. They shake us to our foundations, yet we persist.

Ours is not to reason why.

Maybe we are all haunted by something. Not like a horror movie, but in the way objects and moments and sensations carry weight. The things we leave behind become symbols for the people we’ve lost. A bottle of Coke. A novelty candy container. A Meatloaf song.

A digital video of your son fist-bumping your dad just hours before his death that you know you can’t wear out but, by god, you’re going to try.

In the weeks since he died, I have dreamt about my dad. The last time, he sent me a text:

I AM FLYING HIGH ABOVE THE EARTH!!! I AM SPINNING IN THE SKY!!! I ESCAPED MY PRISON AND I AM FREE FREE FREE!!!

Maybe it was just a dream. Maybe it was as real as anything else.

Either way, I woke up with the feeling that he was gone, but not entirely.

---

The first beer I brewed for Tinear Seasonal is called Some Pale Thing. In Florida, it would have been ready in six weeks. It took almost five months here. That’s fine.

Time does not respect that which does not respect it.

Its name comes from a joke my family made in the days after I moved home. The back porch motion light kept going off, and they asked me to peer around the corner to see what it was. I told them I saw some pale thing lurking there.

We laughed at the time, imagining some ghostly creature creeping just out of sight.

But now, I wonder.

I see my dad everywhere. In pop ads and toilet bowls. In Purell bottles and thick flannels. In the smell of distant cigarette smoke.

Maybe we are all haunted.

Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

---

This is my last post here. Going forward, I’ll be sharing my brewing, cooking and the work I’m doing on the Humphrey estate at tinearseasonal.com. You can sign up for occasional emails that round up my writing here.

The next beer will be called Ours is Not to Reason Why, in honor of my dad. We made a deliberate choice to return home, expecting to have time. But time wasn’t ours to command. I am learning to accept that some things, especially death, defy logic or fairness. I’m brewing not to explain, but to remember. To honor what was, even if I don’t understand why it had to end so soon.

It should be ready in a month or so. If you’re interested in trying Some Pale Thing or Ours is Not to Reason Why, please reach out. I’d love to share a bottle, either at the homestead in Gasport or at my house in Buffalo.

Tinear Seasonal is an act of love between those who remain. A way to honor ghosts. A commitment to make plans and muster the faith that we’ll see them through.

Even if time does not allow it, I choose to believe this: We were better off for having been together.

We were better off for having been together.