The beer is brewed with yeast harvested from the frosted elfin butterfly instead of from plants and flowers.

Besides being helpful pollinators, you can now credit butterflies with inspiring — and flavoring — a new pale ale.

The new brew, the Frosted Elfin New England-Style Session Pale Ale, is named after the butterfly that helped create it.

First Magnitude Brewing Co. in Gainesville and the Florida Museum of Natural History held a launch party last week to celebrate the new beverage.

Jaret Daniels, associate curator and program director of the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity, said the event's aim was to raise awareness and money to help the frosted elfin butterfly.

The frosted elfin, which can be found in small populations in northern Florida, is declining across much of the eastern United States and is undergoing a species status assessment with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Daniels said. It has vanished from Canada and is considered endangered, threatened or of "conservation concern" in 11 states.

“Most people don’t know about these butterflies at all. They don’t even know how rare these are within Florida,” Daniels said.

This beer marks the seventh collaboration between the two organizations, though this collaboration is unique: The beer is brewed with yeast harvested from the butterfly instead of from plants and flowers.

To create the beer, the researchers and brewers took a trip, with partners in Tallahassee and the U.S. Forest Service, to the Apalachicola National Forest and spent a day in the field netting the butterflies and swabbing them for yeast.

Arthur Rudolph, the quality manager at First Magnitude, said the yeast from this butterfly adds a floral flavor to the beer. The beer is also unique because it contains yeast grown in-house at First Magnitude.

Last year, First Magnitude acquired its own lab to grow the yeast, which is combined with hops, barley and water to create the beer.

“This was the first chance we had to actually go out before the beer was made to see the butterflies and collect the yeast,” he said.

Rudolph took the swabs back to First Magnitude to isolate the yeast and grow it in the brewery lab. Then, the brewers chose the strain they thought would taste best.

“As a company, First Magnitude has always had a conservation-oriented mindset. This is a pretty natural collaboration for us. It’s a great way to contribute to a cause we feel strongly about,” Rudolph said.

The team will host a second launch party at the Brass Tap in Tallahassee on May 25.

“It’s a Panhandle butterfly, so we really want to make that connection within the habitat. We’re reaching a different group of people and exposing that information to people that may not directly come to the Florida Museum of Natural History,” Daniels said.

Phil Harmon, 42, who attended the event and gave the beer a try, described the taste as “fruity, floral and hoppy.”