Fullsteam Brewery paid a premium of 95 cents a pound for local malted barley in 2015, but a hefty $2 a pound for foraged persimmons. There are very practical reasons for brewers to use cultivated raw materials to make beer. Just as obviously, local agriculture complements local beer. Farms have become part of this local story in numerous ways—when brewers build on farm property, make what they call farmhouse ales, or grow their own ingredients.
Sean Lilly Wilson has dreams of one day building a true farmhouse brewery outside of Durham, North Carolina, but from the outset his goal at Fullsteam was to be a pioneer in the Southern beer economy. “Being just a Southern beer business is not as exciting,” he said. Two years before Fullsteam opened in 2010, he had already turned the rather newish concept of “farm to table” into “plow to pint.” When he registered a domain name for his website, he chose www.fullsteam.ag.
“We are starting to see the economics kick in,” he said after the brewery celebrated its fifth anniversary. “Now it’s incumbent on us to maintain what’s started.” Fullsteam set a 10-year goal to purchase 50 percent of its raw ingredients within 300 miles of Durham. They reached 30 percent in their fifth year. Head brewer Brian Mandeville also began to adjust the varieties of hops he uses, looking for those more likely to thrive on North Carolina farms.
“With a critical mass of breweries purchasing local grains, hops, and seasonal harvests, we have the potential to generate significant economic opportunity for farmers and agricultural entrepreneurs in a post-tobacco North Carolina,” Wilson wrote in a regional food publication. “But most of all it’s the farmers. Five years into the adventure, I’ve come away with profound respect for those who farm for a living. If a beer doesn’t work out to our liking, we can brew a new batch and have it ready within two to four weeks. A career farmer has 30 or so chances to get it right in his or her lifetime. Thirty chances to understand the crop’s soil, sunlight, and water needs—assuming the weather cooperates in the first place. All of this makes me even more impressed by farmers who venture into the unknown, planting rows of heirloom grains, building trellises for local hops.”
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The availability of local malt and hops—which will forever be more important to brewers than persimmons and cucumbers—has changed rather quickly. John Mallett provides a tour of craft micro-malsters in Malt: A Practical Guide from Field to Brewhouse, which was published in 2014. Two years before, when For the Love of Hops was written, even the most optimistic hop farmers outside the American Northwest had much to prove. It wasn’t until 2014 that Hop Growers of America (HGA) began tabulating hop acreage planted beyond the states of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho.
“That by itself, that it’s being tracked, is significant,” said Tom Britz, owner of Glacier Hops Ranch in Montana. Farmers in 22 states outside the Northwest cultivated more than 1,250 acres of hops in 2015. They produced less than 2 percent of hops sold, but the acreage was comparable to Australia and more than New Zealand, two countries whose hops are in high demand in the United States and elsewhere. HGA changed its bylaws in 2015 to accommodate individual members. Previously, growers joined hop commissions in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho and the commissions made up the growers association. HGA also established the Small Growers’ Council, with Britz its chair.
“Most of us have fewer years of production (experience) than (Northwest farmers) have generations,” Britz said candidly. He spent three years experimenting with 47 hop varieties before he was ready to harvest his first crop in 2016. This included varieties grown traditionally in the Northwest, popular hops grown in the Southern Hemisphere, and formerly wild American hops (Humulus neomexicanus) bred in the Southwest. During the 2015 harvest, Britz explained what would happen next:
“[B]esides my own acreage, I have two teeny satellite growers who have 70–200 plants that are three to six years old who want me to harvest for them in the next couple weeks. That is the model of the future. I have another grower with four acres going in starting this fall, another with up to 15 acres (I am advocating him starting smaller), another with up to 35 (ditto).… In three or four years, this corner of Montana might look very different. It’s going to have to be all concentrated near the harvest/processing facilities.
Bottom line: there is no hop infrastructure in Montana anywhere. Once I create the harvesting/processing/distribution infrastructure for myself, it is starting to open up the door for a centralized/geocentric hub here in northwest Montana. But I had to become my own first customer. I’m sure that’s a story you’ll hear in one flavor or another across the country.
The barrier is the infrastructure.”
There are other challenges involved in growing them, starting with disease. Also, hops are photoperiodic, and day length is a critical factor for both vegetative growth and flowering. While they grow between latitudes 30º and 52º, they thrive between 45º and 50º. The plants are annual above ground and perennial below, and they need six to eight weeks of dormant time with the temperature below 40ºF (4.4ºC).
Nonetheless, farmers in 25 states planned to harvest hops in 2016, with some regions well ahead of others and everybody outside of New York and Michigan looking to those two states because they are the most advanced. Although Michigan hop growers planted more acres, New York had more farms. Farmers in New York benefited when the state established a Farm Brewery license in 2012, allowing breweries to sell beer by the glass at their own facility and elsewhere, including farmers markets, if they use a certain (escalating) percentage of malted grain and hops grown within the state.
The first commercial field to operate since 1954 was planted in 1999, but 11 years later farmers harvested only 15 acres. “We have a real mix of people,” said Steve Miller, hired by the Cornell Cooperative Extension in 2011 as the state’s first hop specialist. “There are only a couple of growers who’ve had hops in for more than 10 years in the state. The vast majority of growers have only had them in for a year or two.”
When New York was the largest hop-growing region in the world in 1879, the average yield in the state was 554 pounds per acre. A few farms with mature plants are getting 1,500 pounds today. “It’s based on people becoming growers, not hobbyists,” Miller said. “People who have knowledge and equipment and barns.” However, that’s still only three-quarters of what growers manage with the same varieties in the Northwest. Farmers in the rest of the country will not survive competing with them on price. “I think five years from now we’ll be in that (competitive) position,” Miller said in 2015. “(Brewers will say) this Fuggle or this Cascade is not just local. I actually like it better than (the same hop) I can get elsewhere.”
Brian Tennis put in the first hopyard in Michigan on his New Mission Organics farm, 35 miles north of Traverse City in 2007. “We didn’t have a road map,” he said. “Crazy demand. We weren’t ready for that. You built whatever you could make work.” He grows only organic hops on his 30-acre farm, but also processes about another 50 acres from other farmers during a harvest season.
Several farms in other areas of the state are much bigger. “We’re probably getting ahead of ourselves, but people just want hops so bad,” Tennis said. “About 75 percent of what we grow stays in Michigan.” Many varieties imported from the Northwest are susceptible to downy mildew, a constant problem in Michigan. Tennis is currently testing 30 varieties in his greenhouse. “We want to put in five acres of weird stuff,” he said. “Those are what will differentiate us.”
Farmers seemingly everywhere are turning both to old and new varieties. Hops-Meister, a farm in Northern California, revived two different varieties of California Cluster—as recently as 1971, Cluster and its various subvarieties accounted for more than 80 percent of the hops grown in America—called Ivanhoe and Gargoyle. In New York several are marketing some of their hops as heirloom. Most of the found plants are genuine heirlooms that have been growing in the wild for up to a century. “It’s like finding wild apples,” Miller said. “A majority are so-so.”
Genuinely wild hops also present an opportunity. Sierra Nevada was the first to widely distribute a beer made with native American hops, making a beer brewed with Medusa hops part of its Harvest IPA series and introducing the public to H. neomexicanus hops.
The genus Humulus likely originated in Mongolia at least six million years ago. A European type diverged from that Asian group more than one million years ago; a North American group migrated from the Asian continent approximately 500,000 years later. Although there are five botanical varieties of Humulus—H. lupulus (the European type, also found in Asia and Africa; later introduced to North America), H. cordifolius (found in Eastern Asia, Japan), H. lupuldoides (Eastern and north-central North America), H. pubescens (primarily Midwestern United States), and H. neomexicanus (Western North America)—the first and last are the two of interest to brewers.
Hops of American heritage, which include some grown in Australia and New Zealand, contain compounds found only at trace levels in hops originating in England and on the European continent. Among them is a thiol called 4-mercapto-4-methylpentan-2-one (otherwise referred to as 4MMP), a main contributor to the muscat grape/black currant character associated with American-bred hops such as Cascade, Simcoe, and Citra. It has a low odor threshold and occurs naturally in grapes, wine, green tea, and grapefruit juice. It is one contributor to what were described as “unhoppy” aromas not long ago, and today as desirable “fruity, exotic flavors derived from hops.”
The first colonial brewers found hops growing in the wild, likely H. lupuldoides, but they also imported plants, and, naturally, hybrids such as Cluster emerged. Hop breeding was in its infancy at the beginning of the twentieth century when Ernest S. Salmon, a professor at Wye College in England, set out to combine the high resin content of American hops with the aroma of European hops. This approach took hops in a new direction, and eventually to a broader spectrum of aromas. For instance, the pedigree of Citra contains 19 percent Brewers Gold, the first bred hop that Salmon released in 1934.
Interest in native American hops is twofold. First, they have had hundreds or thousands of years to adapt to their environment and develop resistance to local diseases. They may well be better suited to growing in new regions than varieties bred for the American Northwest. Second, they may contain compounds that yield new aromas and flavors.
Todd Bates did not set out to fill that need when he began collecting plants growing wild in New Mexico in the 1990s. Bates, who lives on a farm between Santa Fe and Taos, used them in homeopathic tinctures he made, and secondarily for homebrewing. When he began breeding them to use in beer his approach was radically different. “I found most really suck bad. Horrible flavors,” he explained. “That’s why I decided to breed from a specific group of plants of pure neomexicanus that were thriving in an area of known high levels of naturally occurring uranium. Persistent NORM (Naturally Occurring Radioactive Materials) causes things such as knockout genetics that result in shorter internodes, doublet flowers, and other potentially beneficial mutations. I found a few groups in that NORM area with different traits, but each group had its drawbacks on their own … so I bred them together.”
He did not simply find Medusa growing on a mountainside. She (the hop plants that produce the cones brewers want are all female) resulted from his personal breeding program, and he selected her because of her unique doublet flowers and high beta acid. He initially called it Multi-head because of its appearance. In 2011 Eric Desmarais planted two of Bates’ varieties in one of his CLS Farms hopyards in Washington’s Yakima Valley. They looked much different than anything else cultivated in Washington. The cone-to-leaf ratio was higher, the nettles on the bines were much larger, the laterals grew differently, and the leaves were a very dark green and almost waxy. “During the growing season, I have consultants walk the fields on a weekly basis, doing disease and pest scouting,” Desmarais said. “These guys have been walking hop yards for 18 years, and walk most of the US hop industry yards. They see just about everything. I didn’t tell them what these were last year on purpose, to see what their reaction was. They knew they were looking at something very different.”
Tom Nielsen at Sierra Nevada Brewing, who is involved with everything related to flavor and raw materials at the brewery, was among those intrigued. Smithsonian.com reported: “What Nielsen found was a beer with aromas and flavors completely different from anything he’d ever tasted, with strong, fresh, almost fleshy fruit notes and spicy layers. Moreover, Nielsen found that the beer had a different effect on its drinkers, something he wasn’t expecting. ‘I’m not saying it’s like you’re tripping on acid or anything,’ he explained, ‘but you just felt a little different. It was beyond the regular beer buzz.’”
To add to that, Britz observed: “Anecdotally, we’ve noticed the insects (particularly yellow jacket wasps and bald black hornets) swarm to the neomexicanus varieties more than any of the other 37 varieties. And they act strange … like they have a serious hop haze going on.… There appears to be some concentration of a compound that is found in higher concentrations in these native plants, compared to the other varieties. The yellow jackets will just drop to the ground and walk in a circle.”
Bates no longer breeds or grows hops, instead focusing on wild mountain oregano. CLS Farms in Yakima owns the rights to Medusa—a hop Bates first called Multi-head and Desmarais renamed in 2014—as well as other experimentals Bates developed. Monks at Christ in the Desert monastery in northern New Mexico are growing five varieties Bates bred, using some in beers they have brewed under contract and selling some to homebrewers. In addition, a retired hop broker briefly sold rhizomes of plants Bates developed, including Multi-head and another called Amalia, and they are scattered across the country.
Amalia takes its name from one of the regions where Bates collected hops. It’s a village 60 miles north of Taos and very close to the Colorado border. It sits 8,600 feet above sea level (compared to 5,800 where Bates bred hops), with about a four-month growing season. Recently, Ceilidh Creech, who moved to Amalia in 2010, formed Amalia Hops to sell hops grown in the region. She has collected 750 plants from throughout the valley. “We are looking to build our own lab and are keeping exhaustive records in a spreadsheet, tracking moisture, sunlight, temperature swings, direction vines are facing, internode distances, growth rates, maturity date rates, snowfall during dormant period … well, just about everything you could think of to track,” she said.
To generate cash while developing varieties brewers would want, the company planned to market a blend of hops taken from multiple plants each year. “So the blend will change each year depending on yields, much as Beaujolais Nouveau wine changes every year,” she said. Amalia Hops has trademarked “Neomexicanus Nuevo.” The logo features a dancing skeleton holding a hop bine in one hand and a mug of beer in the other.
Such is the appeal of “wild hops.” But in New Mexico, as elsewhere, they must still prove themselves. “This may be a 50-year project,” Creech said.
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Although Fullsteam issues a call for foragers when raw materials such as persimmons and pawpaws are in season, Wilson already knows where most of what he needs for a recipe will come from. Cultivation remains essential not only for barley and hops, but for most ingredients brewers want to use on a large scale.
“Sweet potato lager (has) the potential to scale,” Wilson said. North Carolina has been the number-one sweet potato–producing state in the country since 1971, harvesting about half the nation’s crop each year. It made perfect sense for a brewery promoting Southern food culture and suggesting there might be such a thing as a Southern indigenous beer style to begin with a sweet potato lager Wilson named Carver (George Washington Carver did pioneering research related to sweet potatoes). “First and foremost a lager, not a scented candle,” Wilson said.
“The world does not need another pumpkin pie beer,” he said, making his opinion clear. “Over-the-top components we refuse to do. We ask ourselves, beyond the ingredients, what is Southern beer about? What is the ethos? Quiet confidence.”
Fullsteam received a Good Food Award for its persimmon beer, First Frost. Chez Panisse’s Alice Waters presented Wilson the award in person. “I’ll never forget that moment,” Wilson said. But he makes it clear Fullsteam first made the beer because of its Southern connection. “We’re not interested in replicating beer styles, so how do you go beyond the novelty of throwing in local ingredients? At this point that is the most boring thing we can do.”
He learned that when his brewery tried making a beer with kudzu, an invasive vine once used to illustrate an REM cover. “Just because it grows around here doesn’t mean you need to brew with it. Nehi grape soda smell. Lousy beer,” he said.
Fullsteam puts out a call for several seasonal ingredients, but the two the brewery buys the most of are persimmons and pawpaws. “We’ve developed a network of people who know we have to buy a boatload of persimmons,” Wilson said. About 20 percent of the people who sell persimmons to Fullsteam will contribute 1,600 of the 2,000 pounds needed, with the other 400 pounds coming from hobby foragers. “We’re not the first in North Carolina to make a persimmon beer. They (early settlers) were desperate for a fermentable,” Wilson said. “We’re arcing back to (colonial times), a tradition in North Carolina.”
Because “Americans are more about anticipating the season than celebrating the harvest,” Fullsteam freezes the persimmons. First Frost will be brewed the next spring and released when persimmons are in season. Fullsteam does the same thing with pawpaws (see recipe, page 292), buying them in season and making a beer when the next year’s crop is mature.
Foragers find some of the pawpaws, but Wynn Dinnsen, who has 250 trees and a passion for the fruit that matches Wilson’s, provides most of them. “I grew up with pawpaws, but the ones we get from the farm are larger than any pawpaw I have ever seen in the wild,” head brewer Brian Mandeville explained. “Wynn has done a lot of selective breeding to get a really good seed to pulp ratio and his pawpaws are fantastic.… We start by freezing the pawpaws whole and then thawing them back out. This process not only allows us to store them until we have enough to work with but also softens them a good bit. Following that, we cut them up into very small pieces—skins, seeds, and pulp all together—and then mash them until they are the consistency of a mildly chunky custard using a Czech Republic military–issued potato masher.” Mandeville originally received the masher as a gag gift, but it has proven to be a useful brewery tool.
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The United States now has more breweries operating on farms than it had breweries fewer than 50 years ago, when neither farming nor brewing looked much like a growth industry. These breweries don’t all make whatever farmhouse beers might be, and not every farm grows enough grain or hops to brew much more than a single batch of beer. However, the agriculture connection is always obvious, even when a farm and brewing don’t fit naturally.
“Everything you do is harder,” said David Achkio, head brewer at Lickinghole Creek Brewing, Virginia’s first farm brewery. “We joke it is just as hard as it would be to do on the moon.”
Sean-Thomas and Lisa Pumphrey built the brewery from scratch on their family’s 290-acre farm in rural Goochland, about 40 minutes from Richmond or Charlottesville. It was previously owned by a timber company that clear-cut everything. They began reclaiming the land around 2005. “There was no electricity,” Achkio said. When it rained, delivery trucks would get stuck in the mud. Before the Pumphreys opened their doors in 2013 county officials told them they would need to pave a three-quarter mile road to the brewery as well as all parking areas. Only nine cars, or 21 people, could visit the brewery at one time. In 2014 the state legislature passed a measure that treats farm breweries the same as wineries, among other things allowing 249 visitors at a time. The tasting room is tiny, but there is plenty of outdoor space and Lickinghole sets up a tent on weekends. Achkio brewed 2,200 barrels in 2015, but after adding more fermentation tanks early in 2016 expected production to grow 75 percent.
The farm was mostly hay and woods, with a two-acre pumpkin patch, before the Pumphreys added one acre of hops and 55 for grains—including 35 acres of six-row barley, 10 acres of wheat, and 10 acres of rye—as well as an herb garden. The hop yard yielded enough in 2015 for a single batch of Estate Series Gentleman Farmer Fresh Hop Ale. Achkio doesn’t use all the barley the farm grows because he finds the six-row variety somewhat harsh, though he has used it in different brown ales for the nutty component it provides. Virginia farmers gave up trying to grow barley in colonial times, and state colleges have only recently begun research to find varieties that brewers consider attractive that are suitable for the climate.
The brewery building itself is designed to look like a horse barn, and Achkio chooses not to use the term “farmhouse ales.” But several of his beers ferment with yeast sourced from Belgium, and Belgians who do not like sweeter takes on saison would find both his Estate Series Short Pump Rosemary Saison and Pumpkin Ain’t Easy refreshingly “digestible.”
Pumpkin Ain’t Easy illlustrates a challenge a farm brewery may face. Lickinghole Creek uses fresh pumpkins grown on the farm in the beer. By the time their sugar pumpkins are ready to brew with, other breweries have shipped beers made with pumpkins harvested the year before (or in many cases no pumpkins at all). Lickinghole Creek is lucky to get beer on retailers’ shelves for the last two weeks of “pumpkin season.”
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Crossroads Farm grows all the hops Tobias Schock uses to make the Agrarian Ales Brewing Company beers, which, perhaps surprisingly, can limit his choices. “I look around and I am only going to have these hops,” he said on a spring day in 2015. “None of the Eugene drinkers can understand why we don’t have an IPA. We’re on a hop farm. We pick them by hand. No way I could manage an IPA.” He’s one of fewer than 10 brewers in Oregon who does not make an IPA.
Agrarian’s beers follow the beat of the farm and season, as well as something Schock once heard from Dave Logsdon, founder of Wyeast Laboratories and later his own small brewery on a farm. “He said ‘It’s not a style, it’s a place.’ If your beer is reflecting that place then you have authentic farmhouse beer in hand,” Schock said. “You are changing the conversation from multiple angles.”
Field Bier is the only regular on the brewery’s chalkboard taplist at the brewery, and that won’t always be the same. On a sunny Sunday in the spring of 2015 it was a 4% ABV “farmhand session” beer fermented with a saison yeast. Other times it might be a hefeweizen. “It is what the season gives us,” Schock said.
Every one of the redwood picnic tables on the north side of the brewery was full, most of them brightened by several distinctive, slender 20-ounce glasses holding different measures of beer. During the summer at least five beers of less than 5% ABV will be available. Schock talked about the practice of selecting ingredients to produce beers that customers would expect to taste the same each time. “We can’t do that. We embrace the variability,” he said. “We let that be who we are.”
Brothers Ben and Nate Tilley planted hops on the farm their parents operate in 2007, knowing that they wanted to open a brewery. Linn County to the north is the “grass seed capital” of the world. “You’ll see (combines) rolling across a field, tons of dust,” Schock said. Around Coburg, the brewery’s mailing address, the farms are smaller. It is flat here near the Willamette River, although to the east Mount Tom and the Hayworth Saddle rise up impressively. Schock uses his hands to illustrate how the river bends, talking about where it deposits rich loam. A portable chicken coop is set up outside the greenhouse where hop plants are being prepared for planting.
Crossroads started in 1985 as an organic vegetable farm. The Tilley family later began to specialize in chile peppers, while still producing a variety of produce that it sells regularly at farmers markets. The brewery and tasting room are located in what was the dairy barn, built in the 1940s. The brewing system seems appropriately rudimentary, but not in a way that it becomes an affectation. Grundy tanks, ubiquitous in early startups, give it a 1990s feel. The mash tun is an insulated dairy tank once used for keeping milk cool before it was packaged. It has a simple false bottom.
“Temperature is a big one, the one glaring us in the face,” Schock said, talking about seasonal adjustments specific to Agrarian. The brewery doesn’t have a glycol chiller, and primary fermentation takes place at ambient temperatures. The weather is temperate, with highs about 81°F in July and August and lows averaging 33°F in December and January. “It’s a relief harvest season is over,” he said in the fall of 2015, rattling off a list of freshly harvested ingredients—wet hops, raspberries, plums, pumpkins, apples, and pears. All the fruits are pressed in-house.
“All the fermentations slow down. Kind of hibernation mode,” he said. It’s the season for lager yeast, for richer beers, and to ferment beers using English-sourced yeast more often and Belgian-sourced yeast less often. “It’s nice to change. The beers taste new and different,” he said.
When the weather cools he can think about brewing a beer he named Indigenous (see recipe, page 274), which is released each year for Cinco de Mayo. “It was one of those homebrew ideas I had that marinated. I waited and waited,” he said. It is fermented with a steam beer yeast, which Schock calls “immigrant yeast,” in the upper 50s (°F). He makes the beer using a cereal mash, first slow-toasting multicolored heirloom corn named for the Abenaki tribe. “We work with other farmers who specialize in what they grow. We grow chiles and hops,” Schock said. Lonesome Whistle Farm, across the Willamette River from Crossroads, grows the corn, dries the cobs whole, runs them through a sheller, then sorts the kernels using a gravity table.
After crushing the toasted corn, Schock conducts the cereal mash with three parts corn to one part barley before folding it into the main mash. He first adds dried and smoked chiles (the farm has its own smokehouse) near the end of the boil, then a larger charge at flameout. He breaks the dried chiles into pieces and rehydrates them with wort, which creates a puree. He’ll also add a few dried chiles into a keg, aware that spontaneous fermentation could result, but keeping the keg cold and expecting it to sell quickly.
Schock uses a cereal mash in brewing Country Common for a nearby restaurant, too. That beer is soured with Lactobacillus and described as an undistilled whiskey wash. He read once about Kentucky Common being a sour beer (see page 42) “and twisted it in my way.” The beer takes two-and-a-half months from brewing to glass, is unfiltered, and is strikingly clear. It is 5.9% ABV, a little stronger than common in Kentucky. “We are in Oregon,” Schock said, smiling broadly. “It’s an Oregon lager.”
Each year he does a little foraging, picking Sitka spruce tips at a secret spot and using them along with yarrow and triticale grain. “It’s a beer for IPA lovers. We’re wiggling them out of that Northwest beer/IPA box,” he said.
In October 2014 Dave Anderson put Dave’s Brew Farm, a seven-barrel wind-powered brewery set on a 35-acre farm, up for sale. Eighteen months later he and his wife still owned it and expected they might for the foreseeable future. More than 800 US breweries opened in the meantime, so perhaps Anderson was a little too honest about the challenges of running a small farm brewery or the $500,000 price tag was too high. He put the business on the market not long before the winds in western Wisconsin started to blow cold, and it would take a tractor with a scoop to keep the driveway leading to the brewery door clear of snow. “Is it a full-time job? Seven days a week, 24 hours a day—yeah, it is a full-time job,” he said, not long after he turned 50. “It’s a young man’s job.”
The brewery is located about halfway between Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and Minneapolis–St. Paul. Anderson sold about 200 barrels a year before he put it on the market, most of it in the taproom that was open every other weekend. “I hate to coin it as a lifestyle, but it was enough to support ourselves and pay off debt,” he said. His wife, Pamela Nixon, ran a CSA (community supported farm), selling produce grown in a half-acre garden beside the brewery. The couple leased most of the property out for hay farming and as pastureland for a dairy farm.
Anderson and Nixon decided to sell the brewery after she took a tenure track teaching position at Viterbo University in La Crosse. “I’ve got a few other projects gestating,” he said at the time. “And no, one of them is not opening another brewery.”
In the years before buying the Brew Farm, Anderson helped startups in Vietnam, Israel, Italy, and other countries. He became fascinated with wind power when he first saw a giant turbine spinning in Europe. “Plus, it makes a statement,” he said. In addition to erecting a 20-kW wind generator on a 120-foot tower, he installed geothermal heating and cooling. He acted as general contractor for the brewery and the A-frame house that sits on top of the tasting room.
Anderson brewed most often on a 10-gallon pilot system rather than using the seven-barrel brewhouse, which once belonged to Selin’s Grove Brewing in Pennsylvania and, before that, Avery Brewing in Colorado. The reason was obvious when he opened up his recipe book. “It’s great to have eight beers on tap. I love the idea you can’t get them everywhere else. Some people come every weekend we’re open,” he said, stopping to look at a recipe for rhubarb saison. To make that beer, he roasted the rhubarb, made a puree, and added it during the boil. He turned to another page with a recipe for a pea beer, also 10 gallons. For that one he pureed two pounds and five ounces of peas, adding them with 10 minutes left in the boil.
Dave Anderson says the turbine that looms over the farmland he built a Wisconsin brewery on “makes a statement.”
“We’re a farmhouse, we follow the seasons,” he said, sounding much like Schock. “(The goal is to) expand what beer can be, and maybe what it was.”
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The Rogue Farms hop fields in Oregon’s Willamette Valley yielded 0.083% of the US hop crop in 2015. But the 333 200-pound bales of hops are only part of what makes the farms valuable to Rogue. Along with hops, Rogue grows corn, jalapeños, marionberries, barley, rye, wheat, pumpkins, cucumbers, apples, apricots, cherries, peaches, pears, plums, and a range of herbs at its farms in Independence and in the Tygh Valley. Rogue Ales also keeps bees in Independence.
“Hops give us a platform to try this,” said company president Brett Joyce back in 2011. It was after the hop shortage of 2007 that Rogue decided to grow hops, leasing land owned by the Coleman family and contracting with them to oversee the operation. Rogue’s success with hops inspired the brewery to grow a portion of its own barley on the Tygh Ranch, far to the north and east of the hopyard. What he refers to as the “Rogue experience” has expanded every year since.
“Part of it is the fun, the creativity,” he said. “What can we plant that will be fun?”
Part of it is educational. There’s little intrinsically interesting about marionberries, but Rogue walked consumers through the agricultural experience even though the first full-scale crop would not be harvested until 2016. The annual crop report outlined the similarities to growing hops and explained the relationship between marionberry flowers and honeybees, which contribute the other essential ingredient to Marionberry Braggot.
Just a few years ago Joyce was comfortable, when many brewers were not, to use the T word, terroir. Rogue has since begun promoting dirtoir, and Joyce has the same message he had in 2011: “We believe origin matters. I don’t think consumers view beer as an agricultural product,” he said. The list of organizations Rogue Farms belongs to would suggest his company does: Agriculture Conference of America, American Beekeeping Federation, American Distilling Institute, American Farm Bureau, American Malting Barley Association, Craft Maltsters Guild, National Turkey Federation, United States Association of Cidermakers, and Hop Growers of America.
“More and more people are finding their way out to our farm. Sometimes I’m amazed they do,” he said. The farm is tucked in a deep bend of the Willamette River, on a road that is not accessible when it rains heavily, as it often does in Oregon. December 2015 was particularly wet. Joyce was delighted that snow in the Tygh Valley had left a thick blanket on the barley fields. He was disappointed that December’s rains were the heaviest in 124 years and had closed the single road to the Independence farm again.
Joyce noted something that happens on the farm that doesn’t seem to happen anywhere else: “If you are at a restaurant or a bar, everything happens faster,” he said. “On the farm it seems to slow people down.”
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Brothers Karlos, Dorsey, and Byron Knott plowed under a bean field on the family farm in Arnaudville, Louisiana, to build Bayou Teche Brewing. Now they brew beer and raise crawfish on the side, and seemingly every decision they make is predicated on preserving Louisiana’s Acadian culture.
That all fits together on a Saturday at the brewery, when local Cajun and zydeco bands entertain, and Bayou Teche serves its food-friendly beer along with crawfish. The Louisiana State University agriculture center, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and the State Department of Environmental Quality worked with Bayou Teche to design a series of three marshes to reclaim water used in brewing. Solid waste and water is racked into the first pond—which Karlos calls a swamp—at the end of brewing. Then water is transferred into a marsh inhabited by native plants, including cattails, before now-clean water is emptied into the third pond, home to the crawfish. “Now we get bird-watchers, eco-tourists,” Karlos said, laughing musically. “Along with music fans and beer fans.”
Karlos Knott variously refers to Louis Michot as the brewery’s “Official Ambassador to the United States” and the sales representative for French speakers. Michot also plays fiddle and sings vocals for the Lost Bayou Ramblers, a band he formed in 1999. At the outset the Ramblers played primarily traditional acoustic Cajun music, but now the influence of rock and alternative music is obvious. The New York Times called them “a riotous Cajun rock band.”
It was Michot and Karlos Knott who in 2011 hatched the idea to record young Cajun bands performing classic rock songs, all of them sung in Cajun French. Knott explained that it was another way to preserve the language. “You know the lyrics in your head,” he said. The Lost Bayou Ramblers performed “Ma Génération,” and other tracks included Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys’ “Au Long de la Rivière” (Neil Young’s “Down by the River”) and Feufollet transforming the Four Tops’ “Reach Out, I’ll Be There” into “Me Voila.” The CD, “En Français: Cajun ‘n’ Creole Rock ‘n’ Roll,” was released by Bayou Teche Records. Offbeat magazine in New Orleans wrote, “The album’s message? Just as older generations of Cajuns had to fight to get French reinstated in Louisiana schools, this generation wants to make sure it stays that way.”
It was so well received that Michot and Knott produced “En Français, Vol. 2” with several better known bands volunteering to participate. “They did it for gas money,” Knott said. “Plus, we fed them and gave them beer.” Knott handed out both CDs at the 2015 Great American Beer Festival and talked about a third recording, this one available “on a beer bottle.” His plan was to print information about how to download the recording on the label.
Ultimately, an Offbeat profile concluded, Lost Bayou Ramblers and Bayou Teche Brewing are dedicated to creating new styles that are unique to South Louisiana but can be appreciated anywhere. “It’s not about just making another beer, or another album,” Michot told reporter Nora McGunnigle. “It’s about creating something artistically pleasing to the ears and the palate. It’s about caring about what you put out, and not just because it fits into a category.”
The beer is not coincidental—flagship LA-31 Bière Pâle has become surprisingly easy to find in Louisiana and beyond, and Southern Living magazine appropriately described it as “perfect for summer and crawfish boils.” The brothers brewed their first batches on a one-barrel system in an old rail car. Karlos Knott tells the same story as scores of others: He discovered how diverse beer could be when he was stationed in Germany with the army and began homebrewing when he returned home.
Bayou Teche uses locally grown rice in Ragin’ Cajuns Genuine Louisiana Ale, a Kölsch-inspired beer it started making in the fall of 2015 in partnership with the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Other beers include some brewed with local honey, local peppers, and for their fifth anniversary in 2015, a Berliner weisse made with local persimmons. “We jokingly refer to our Berliner weisse as a ‘Bayouliner weisse,’” Dorsey Knott said. “We decided to add persimmons because there are persimmon trees in nearly every yard in rural Louisiana. We have a grove of these trees on our family farm behind the brewery that we call Persimmon Pointe. We grew up eating them and still eat them fresh, in ice cream and persimmon bread, too.”
Typically, the honey for Miel Sauvage (Cajun French for “wild honey”) comes from the nearby Atchafalaya Basin. The potent (9.5% ABV) beer was aged for 100 days in whiskey barrels, the same number of days Napoleon spent in exile in Elba. Many of his officers fled France to an area just north of where the brewery is located. Karlos Knott explained there are three French dialects and that they meet in Arnaudville. “That’s why they say, ‘They speak the prettiest French in Arnaudville,’” he said.
“Our worldview is more French—we look at our leisure and meal time differently than the rest of America,” said Karlos.
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Brian Durham was listening to National Public Radio on his drive to work one morning when he heard a report about preserving Pawpaw French, a disappearing dialect in the Ozarks. “I thought, ‘That’s it. We’re getting some pawpaws, we’re buying some French (saison) yeast,’” he said. Piney River Brewing was going to brew Pawpaw French Saison.
The entrance to Piney River Brewing is at the end of a two-mile-long gravel road. The brewery quickly outgrew a renovated barn, adding a 12,000-square-foot facility to meet demand.
Piney River is located on a farm five winding miles outside of Bucyrus, Missouri, because Brian and Joleen Durham live on the farm. They bought their house in 1997 and the rest of the 80 acres they live on five years later. They also raise beef cattle on the property, but were too busy with the brewery in 2015 to get around to selling any. They feed spent grain to the cattle and a sign on the long gravel driveway leading to the brewery warns, “Caution, cows may be drunk on mash.”
Piney River Brewing Co. feeds cattle spent grain and warns visitors as they drive up the driveway.
They are not afraid of wordplay. When they renovated a 75-year-old barn that became their brewery tasting room they christened it the “BARn.” Each of the beers has a name that connects it to the Ozarks, and a story to back it up. Float Trip Ale, which won a gold medal in the 2014 World Beer Cup American-Style Wheat Beer category, is the most obvious example. It makes perfect sense to those who frequent the Ozarks, but not necessarily to residents of New York or Los Angeles. They offer this description: “A float trip is the quintessential Ozark experience. A canoe, kayak, raft, or tube and a pristine spring-fed Missouri stream creates a lasting memory of our wild and beautiful outdoors. Our hand-crafted blonde ale is the perfect accompaniment to your day on the river, or to simply bring back float trip memories.”
Black Walnut Wheat is their best-selling beer. Of the world’s harvest of black walnuts, 70 percent comes from trees growing wild in Missouri. They are processed in Stockton, about a two-and-a-half-hour drive from the brewery, and about 45 percent of the crop will end up in ice cream. “They’ve got a lot of tannins, kind of bitter,” Brian explained, before Joleen added, “We think the heat (from being added during the mash) takes some of the astringency out and gives you some fruitiness.”
“One day I’m driving to the day job,” Brian said, explaining how the recipe for this beer evolved. “My thought was you could never use enough to make it shine in a heavier beer.” He decided to add a smaller amount to a relatively light beer, but to make it dark, using Midnight Wheat malt and Sinamar syrup. “Dark without the roasted flavor,” he said.
“This is one beer that would scale,” he said, when the discussion turned to brewing with local ingredients. The Durhams were brewing 10-gallon batches when they applied for a brewing license. They pushed a seven-barrel system to capacity in 2015, brewing 1,800 barrels before erecting a new building and installing a 15-barrel system with dual kettles that has the potential to produce 10,000 barrels a year.
“Getting to 10,000 is not a goal. Our goal is to be able to supply our distributors with a high-quality product,” Brian said. “We spent the last two years undersupplying the markets we’re in. We want to brew beer in and about the Ozarks for the Ozarks.”
Pawpaws, on the other hand, would not scale. “You find it all around here in the river bottoms. Good luck getting them before the critters,” he said. They buy their pawpaws from a farm in Ohio.
Pawpaw French is far more rare than the Cajun French that is essential to the culture Bayou Teche is intent on preserving. It is considered a linguistic bridge that melds a Canadian French accent with a Louisiana French vocabulary. The French originally settled Old Mines, Missouri, around 1723, back when the area was part of Upper Louisiana. “My father and mother spoke French very fluently, but they didn’t want us to speak it because it (caused) such trouble in school,” said Cyrilla Boyer, a lifetime resident who was interviewed for the NPR report. She said in the 1920s and ’30s teachers would smack students’ knuckles for speaking French in the classroom. Pawpaw French persisted in Old Mines primarily because the town is so remote.
Historian and musician Dennis Stroughmatt is Pawpaw French’s ambassador to the outside world. He first visited Old Mines back in the 1990s, and there were still hundreds of Pawpaw speakers. “It’s like eating candy when I speak Pawpaw French. That’s the best way I can say. It’s a sweet French to me,” he said. He knows better than to expect the language to make a comeback, but hopes parts of it will survive, and that kids will learn some phrases and will understand the area’s slogan: “On est toujours icitte,” which translates to, “We are still here.”
That part of the Ozarks is what interests the Durhams. “This area is considered economically depressed,” Joleen said. “We are creating value in the Ozarks with something we are making here. That means something to us.”
Joleen grew up nearby. Brian is from New Jersey. The two met at college in Pennsylvania. “I was going to live in the city and write,” she said. “I was leaving here and I was never coming back.”
It was a Saturday afternoon at the BARn. Inside, Scott Dill, superintendent at nearby Houston schools, was playing the guitar as part of a fundraiser for the Houston Education Foundation. Outside on the patio, where Joleen and Brian were sitting with their son, volunteers were selling hot dogs and brats to raise money for the Houston Education Foundation.
She looked around and said, “I wouldn’t trade this. I wasn’t thinking that when I was 18.”