Love Child No. 12

Every family has a wild child 

June 2025

Since its debut in 2011, Boulevard’s Love Child series has been a fun and fascinating dive into the world of wild fermentation, blending, and barrel-aging. Born from our Smokestack Series, Love Child was never meant to follow a single recipe. Instead, each release is a unique, limited-edition experiment, an evolution of the funky, sour, and aged beers developing deep in the heart of our cellars. 
 
The first entry, Love Child No. 1, was aged exclusively in bourbon barrels and boasted a robust 12.5% ABV. The potent beer was crafted using wild cultures like Lacotbacillus and Brettanomyces, which contributed to its complex flavor profile. The label for Love Child No. 1 featured gauges indicating the intensity of three key flavor characteristics: Funk, Sour, and Fruit. This design aimed to provide consumers with a snapshot of the beer’s sensory profile at the time of release, while acknowledging that the beer would evolve as it aged.  
 
This initial small batch release laid the foundation for the Love Child series. Over time the series shifted, leaning more heavily on blends of Flanders-style red ales and Belgian-style golden ales. That evolution brought not only more drinkable ABVs, but also a wider, more playful palette of flavors from soft lactic tartness to zippy fruit and gentle funk. Guided by the palates of our expert blenders, rather than a rigid recipe, each blend is hand selected from a curated collection of barrels, puncheons, foeders, and tanks, aging each beer with wild yeasts and bacteria. 

“In general, Love Child is always an exciting opportunity to showcase our wild fermentations that are away in their own realm of diverse flavors,” says Brent Cox, Boulevard’s resident wild and sour barrel expert. “Sometimes there are barrels that don’t necessarily fit into a traditional style but have super interesting attributes. Doing a Love Child blend gives us a chance for an exploratory weaving of these various funkified vessels into a new complex creature of its own. It’s a truly fun way of finding complimentary notes that make the wildness of these fermentations shine.” 

We’re thrilled to announce the newest member of the family with the release of Love Child No. 12, our latest and most exploratory blend yet. This year’s version is a thoughtfully crafted combination of: 

• 55% various sour puncheons – a wide-ranging mix of golden ales and Flanders red ales, aged in large wooden vessels of various ages and hues 

• 30% barrel-aged pale ale – chosen for its pronounced oak character and ability to balance acidity 

• 15% barrel-aged barleywine – contributing depth, roundness, and a warming base to elevate the funk 

The result is a beer that’s layered, lively, and truly unlike anything else in our portfolio. Love Child No. 12 is a testament to the magic that happens when creativity meets craft in the world of wild beer. 

 
“But wait, the label says Boulevard Brewing Company, Kansas City MO/Buellton CA, what’s up with that?” 

Great question. Our previous Love Child bottles have been bottled in 750ml bottles, but Love Child No. 12 is in a 375ml bottle. That’s because of two things, 1) whenever we use wild yeast and bacteria, we prefer to keep those yummy bugs away from our production brewery and 2) our partners at Firestone Walker have not only the capability to produce these sours but the new bottle format is better for savoring. Additionally, when we made the decision to retire our vintage 750mL bottling line, we no longer had the ability to produce fan favorites like Saison Brett and Love Child. While we missed these delicate and delicious beers, the risk of infection was too great to attempt to produce them onsite.  
 
Fortunately for us we have great family members, and our beer brothers and sisters at Firestone Walker have a bottling line away from their own main production facility in Paso Robles that is available for our own use. Brent Cox and his team have worked diligently on the ground in Buellton to develop a process to continue producing these beloved Boulevard beers.  
 
Think of it this way, if you are invited to a family reunion at your brother or sister’s house, and you make your world-famous Vanilla Butter Cake in their kitchen for everyone to enjoy, it’s still your recipe, your labor of love, only you’ve used a piece of kitchen gear that you don’t own. Folks at the cookout may give you credit for the cooking, but it would be rude not to acknowledge that you couldn’t have done it without your family’s state-of-the-art stand mixer. 
 
Side note: Vanilla Butter Cake is an excellent pairing with Love Child No. 12