With a newfound interest in herbal and ancient ales, sometime in the last few years I decided to also try and brew a beer inspired by Norwegian Kornøl, a no-boil beer or "raw ale" made with smoked malts and juniper branches. Despite not needing to boil this beer, there were plenty of other aspects that did make it a challenge, like foraging juniper branches to infuse them in the brewing water, boiling the hops in the sparge water for antimicrobial effect, or sourcing the right kind of malts from Viking Malt to stay as true to style as possible. Fermented with Hornindal kveik, this turned out to be an easy drinking table beer, full-bodied, delicately smoky, with a perceived sweetness due to proteins still being present from the lack of boiling. This wasn't my first smoked beer, but wanting to experiment even more, I later decided to brew a dark saison with the leftover smoked malts from the raw ale, just that this time I would also be using some cherry wood smoked hops that I'd been gifted. Fermented with a farmhouse yeast strain, this one was then refermented with Brettanomyces, which really elevated the flavor profile and played incredibly well with the smokiness. Experimenting further still, I split the batch shortly before bottling and dry hopped each half with the smoked hops again, then added powdered black chanterelle mushrooms (Craterellus cornucopioides) to one half. What resulted was a very well rounded, complex beer, with gentle smokiness, funk, and an earthy umami undertone that just gets better with time.