FROM THE BEGINNING of this project, I really wanted to make beer in a barrel. In fact, even before I knew much about the nuts and bolts of producing beer, I knew that I wanted to put it in a keg. Partly because, at first anyway, I thought it would be historically accurate. And beyond that, to be honest, it sounded so right. “Arr, maties, we’ll tap a keg and then set sail for the high seas,” and so forth.
I was, in fact, wrong. Words like “cask” and “keg,” which I tended to treat as synonyms, are as much about function as the object. On the one hand, in beer lingo, if you are doing what I planned, which was to ferment the beer within a barrel, this is called cask-conditioning, and I think that by extension the vessel you would do it in would be a cask. And it need not be wood — your cask can be aluminum or plastic. Beers made this way are very mildly carbonated, and you have to draw them out of the cask with a hand pump traditionally called a beer engine. Whenever you hear people from the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) in Great Britain talking about “real” ale, this kind of beer is what they mean.
On the other hand, kegged beer refers to beer that is fermented in large tanks, then shot full of carbon dioxide and pumped into bottles, cans or aluminum kegs. Hence “kegger,” a party featuring one of those big metal barrels. The people from CAMRA might deny it, but lots of good — hell, great — beer is made this way. All those fantastic West Coast–style pale ales, for example. One other thing I learned: beer language is laden language. That goes even for the word “barrel,” as we shall see.
To avoid these problems, let me call what I was looking for a “volume beer storage unit.” Sadly, it’s been almost sixty years since aluminum kegs replaced wooden ones, and they are getting fairly thin on the ground. A lot of them were sold off and turned into planters when the breweries switched over. I knew the brewery at Black Creek Pioneer Village used old whiskey kegs precisely because they couldn’t lay their hands on enough of the real thing. On the Web I found a British company that was still manufacturing them, but they warned that they were not to be used for beer. They were intended essentially for decorating, the sort of thing you would scatter about your “Olde English” pub, along with the horse brasses, to give it a dollop of authenticity.
I did have leads on one or two collectors who might have wooden kegs to spare, but there were problems with that, too. Specifically, volume. Traditional “volume beer storage units” came in a variety of sizes. At the top end of the range you had the mighty tun, which held 216 imperial gallons. The next step below that was the butt, which held half that, followed by the hogshead, which contained 54 gallons. Smack in the middle was the barrel, a specific form of cask or keg holding 36 gallons, which can be a bit of a source of confusion given how we use the word generically. And just to muddy the water (or ale), American barrels are different from imperial ones — they hold 31 (smaller American) gallons. Below that there were ever smaller units: the kilderkin, the firkin (one of the best things about beer kegs was the nomenclature) and, last but by no means least, the pin, or as it is sometimes called when made out of plastic, the polypin (I’m not kidding). My problem was that even the smallest of these, the pin, held 4.5 imperial gallons, which was more beer than I figured I had the makings for. I needed something smaller, say, a demi-pin.
Back in the early days of my project, I had come across an incredible store called Adventures in Homebrewing on the outskirts of Detroit. I seemed to recall that they did barrels. In fact, they did. Not in many sizes, however. They didn’t have a two-gallon job, but they did advertise an even smaller one that held about 1.2 gallons — what I guess you could call a semi-demi-pin. It wasn’t perfect, but it was close. A sturdy little oak barrel, it was bound by brass rings and featured a cute little spigot. When I called them, they assured me that, yes, it was a real beer barrel. They didn’t have it in stock, but the clerk told me they would order one from Minnesota for me. But he cautioned it might take a while: “Sometimes the barrel guy can be a little . . . mercurial.”
WHEN THE WEATHER turned cooler after Labor Day, I made a load of what I thought of as conventional all-grain beer with store-bought yeast — that is, beer exclusively for drinking, not as an experiment — followed by another conventional brew a few weeks later. I thought of this as building my strategic beer reserve — my dream was to never buy commercial beer again.
Once it was cooler, we could also start thinking about malting again. And bringing in our crops. Back in the late spring, I had planted barley again. You aren’t supposed to plant barley in the same field two years running, but as Harold pointed out, it hadn’t really worked the first year, so it shouldn’t be problem planting it again. As I had something like fifty pounds of barley seed left over from my first go-round with planting, it seemed wasteful not to use it. I planted two lots of barley, separated by a few weeks. The previous year, I had babied my crop and the barley had all died. So I decided to do the exact opposite this time. I did nothing for my crops. Nothing. Didn’t weed, didn’t worry about water, all with the result that this barley did way better than the previous year’s. The first batch looked a little stressed — we had had a very dry summer — but the second lot, which we sowed pretty much just to keep down the weeds and use up an empty bit of field, looked really good. And, in fact, it gave me a fairly decent crop.
The hops had come back strong in the second year, too. Exceeded my expectations, in fact. By midsummer, they had all climbed right to the roof of the henhouse, and some of them were tentatively feeling their way well past there. I extended their lines by screwing two-by-twos to the fascia on their side of the henhouse and similar pieces on the fascia at the opposite end of the coop. Then I ran heavy brown twine between these to give the hops something to climb along. When I picked them in September, I got more than a pound of hops from my plants, mostly from the Cascade and Nugget. The first year I had picked them all individually, like grapes. This year, I didn’t bother — I just cut down the vines and pulled the cones off. It wouldn’t hurt them — hops are tough; cut them right down to the ground and they will come back the next year.
Last year, I had dried my hops for storage on the platform I had nicked from my neighbors’ garbage and tacked a screen over. It had worked all right, but I had a better system in mind for this year. I had found a wobbly and badly oxidized aluminum-framed window screen tucked away in the henhouse — destined, I imagined, for the dump. In an upstairs bedroom at the farm, I created a drying rack by resting the screen on the edges of two chairs and spreading the hops over it. Then I put a fan on the nearby bookshelf — higher than the screen so that the air would move over the hops indirectly instead of blowing them all over the room. I cracked the window and tacked a towel over it so that no light could get in. Sunlight can destroy the volatile oils in hops and give them a skunky flavor. I left them overnight. In the morning, they had dried perfectly and opened up beautifully.
The same banged-up screen proved useful for malting as well. I tucked a space heater under the screen, spread my sodden barley on it, and then tossed a stiff polyester blanket over the chair backs, creating a sort of malting tent. This worked much better than the hair dryer in the oven. The heater had a rheostat, so we were able to control the temperature fairly precisely, too.
I had been a little worried that I let the barley bubble for too long. I got mixed up on the whole four hours soaking, eight hours resting, four hours soaking thing and left it immersed and bubbling all night. In the end, however, it didn’t seem to matter. Which was a good thing because I made this malt with the barley I had personally harvested last fall over at Mike’s farm in Quebec, and I didn’t have a lot of it. Given that I had beaten it with a broom, picked the heads off by hand and winnowed it, I was astounded by how much crud was left in it. So I winnowed it again, using a slightly simpler technique than my earlier full-on Bollywood method. Standing outside on the porch in a good breeze, I grabbed big handfuls of barley and let it trickle through my fingers into a colander. This took some finessing — if the distance between the colander and my hand was too small, I ended up with a lot of chaff. If the distance was too great, most of the barley blew away. It felt like it was about three degrees outside, and I couldn’t do this while wearing gloves, so my hands were in a real state after a couple of hours. Even this work hadn’t quite done the job, so I spread out the barley in a large roasting pan and sorted through it manually. As I picked out what felt like my hundredth timothy seed, I had a revelation (or maybe an excuse): in the olden days, people would have accepted a much higher level of crud in winnowed barley. I was applying the assumptions of the industrial age to a preindustrial process. I needed to accept that any residual chaff and any small stones would simply add — no, make that impart — something special to the malt.
The next batch of malt I made was the best to date, with the same color and general look as commercial two row. And the same taste. I was developing consistency. If I could scale up by a factor of two thousand, I might consider going commercial.
By this point, I had about three and half pounds of malt made from the barley I had harvested in Quebec and threshed and winnowed myself. Just a little bit more and I would have enough for the final brew. When I thought about those original projections I’d found of how much beer an acre of barley would yield, it was almost as though they referred to an entirely different plant. I had harvested a twenty-by-thirty-foot patch in Quebec and would ultimately eke out about five pounds of malt. My original field had been about six times larger than that. This would have given me less than thirty pounds of barley. Not even enough for three five-gallon brews. To get the amount I had originally assumed I would harvest would have required a field six times larger than that. To get enough barley to brew the 28,800 bottles of beer that the University of North Dakota promised an acre would require a field about the size of — oh, North Dakota.
WHEN I HAD embarked on my crazy project back in the fall of 2010 — or at least started thinking about it — I had felt that I was way out there in left field pretty much all by myself. A one-man lunatic fringe. In April 2012, I came across a link to a story in the New York Times on my friend Alan McLeod’s A Good Beer Blog. It was about a young guy named Mark VanGlad who lived outside a town called Stamford in the northern edge of the Catskills in New York State. VanGlad, who ran an outfit called Tundra Brewery, brewed beer using barley and hops grown on his parents’ farm. That was unusual enough, but what was really cool was that, under New York State law, he could sell his beer at farmers’ markets.
I contacted VanGlad shortly after I read this piece with the idea of visiting him to check out his operation. Where he lived wasn’t all that far away from where I was. Unfortunately, the demands of growing and brewing, not to mention writing, made it very hard to nail down a date for a visit.
The keg changed all that. Getting the keg shipped to me across the border was going to cost a whack of money, far more than shipping it a similar distance in the United States. As it happens, a friend of ours, Mike Corrigan, is the resident boat builder at the Antique Boat Museum in Clayton, New York. He has the delightful job of restoring and maintaining the museum’s collection of venerable wooden skiffs and sleek mahogany launches. I had the keg shipped to him. We could visit VanGlad, and whatever other interesting people we could dream up — there is a lot happening in beer in New York State — then pick up the semi-demi-pin from Mike on the way home. If we spent a couple of days down there, we wouldn’t even have to pay duty on it — our personal exemption would cover it on our return.
The keg was supposed to be in Clayton a week or so before we headed south on Halloween. I called Adventures in Homebrewing two days before we left and learned that, thanks to some oversight, they had not ordered it from the mercurial maker in Minnesota. So the order went through again, and the guy I was dealing with told me that it might well make it to Clayton by Friday, when we would be heading back home.
YOU HAVE TO love a state where a gas station chain fills growlers with craft beer on the spot. Canadians used to have a real holier-than-thou attitude toward American beer — it was weak; it was watery; it was flavorless. And although the laws in some parts of the United States lag behind — Mississippi only okayed home brewing in 2010, and it took the Alabama legislature until 2013 to pass a similar law — to visit New York is to enter a brave new world of beer (a beer new world) that many of us can only dream of. I don’t think that our first stop, Watertown, would make a list of the continent’s more sophisticated destinations, but the Bear World market there, nominally a variety store but in reality a commercial temple of beer, carried at least the same number of European imports as you might find in a good Ontario liquor store and more American craft beer than I had ever seen in my life. They had all the ones you’d expect — Sierra Nevada, Dogfish Head and so on — and beyond that, dozens of others from everywhere in the United States — New Orleans, Erie, Pennsylvania, you name it. They even had a growler club — buy nine of their Bear World growlers and you got another one free.
We spent our first night in Geneva, New York, a tidy town that sits at the north end of Lake Seneca in the Finger Lakes district. This area is the home of the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station. I didn’t know this point before I prepped for my trip, but Cornell University, as well as being a pricy Ivy League school, does all the aggy-related outreach for New York State through its extension department. And this station was just one of a number scattered across the state. Geneva is also home to a small liberal arts college. I mention this point only because in my youth I was always amused by those letters in Penthouse magazine that began “I attend a small liberal arts college” before going on to detail some astounding sexual escapade. Now I understand — every place in the United States with more than about a thousand people is also home to a small liberal arts college. And I’d guess that at any given moment, a considerable portion of the American populace is attending one. And, I assume, engaging in astounding sexual escapades.
If the Plant Sciences Building at Guelph was a paean to sixties concrete brutalism, the agricultural station in Geneva seemed to have been designed as a tribute to the U.S. Navy’s submarine fleet. Nary a window in sight, and the tiled walls of the corridors were lined with great round dials, which either measured the humidity or gave the station’s depth below the surface of the sea. The only thing missing was the occasional ping of a sonar set.
I found Professor Karl Seibert, the man I had come to see, working at an old desk piled high with papers in a small office off his lab. For many years the head of research at Stroh Brewery Company, where he directed a team of biologists and chemists, Siebert styles himself Cornell’s “beer guy.” When I’d cut through his lab, I’d noticed all sorts of odd-looking equipment. These, I learned, were devices for accurately measuring beer’s foaminess, cloudiness and alcohol content. As he showed me around, I realized that the disconcerting open cans of Budweiser scattered here and there on lab tables were in fact the subjects of experiments and not, as I had first assumed, the detritus of a raucous night before. This agricultural station was originally established to help the fruit industry, and later it became involved with wine as that became a big business in this part of the state. Now, beer is coming on. As the beer guy, one of Siebert’s newest duties is to give a lecture twice a year on the fundamentals of brewing for a general audience. When he gave this talk for the first time in February 2012, they had initially expected forty people. Interest had been so great they had had to shift to a room that would hold eighty-five, and they still had to turn away dozens of would-be and actual growers, brewers and suppliers.
Local food is big in New York State, as are local wine and beer — the night before at dinner I had a wet-hopped IPA that, my waitress informed us, was brewed two minutes away from the restaurant we were in. (In wet-hopping, the hops go pretty much straight from the vine into the brewing kettle without drying.) The website for the New York State Brewers Association lists dozens and dozens of craft brewers.
And it was about to get a whole lot better. One of the reasons I had wanted to visit Siebert was to talk to him about New York’s new farm brewery law, which the legislature had passed that summer. I had read a very little about it but had no idea what it all meant. Under this new law, Siebert said, if you produce a beer with a minimum of 20 percent of your own hops and 20 percent of your own barley, you get a deal on the excise tax that all brewers must pay the state. In the years to come, Siebert said, the minimum percentages will be progressively increased. The aim is to encourage local production.
Mark VanGlad had already put this idea into practice. From Geneva, Catharine and I headed east and south toward Stamford, New York. Mark’s parents have a maple syrup operation, which is something we are very familiar with in the valley. In fact, a lot of the land around where he lives is like the valley, very hilly and heavily treed, though minus that underpinning of Canadian Shield rock that makes our area such a heartbreaking farming proposition. This was a scruffier part of the state than around Geneva — the towns located in the valleys have a slightly more frayed and unpainted appearance, and there are more trailers and mobile homes tucked away in the dips and hollows. Also reminiscent of home.
“I JUST WANTED to see if I could take it to the next level.”
The lanky, dark-haired VanGlad said this to me as he and I were leaning over the stainless steel tank that served him as a mash tun. We were in a clean, modern outbuilding that doubled as brewery and workspace for his parents’ maple syrup operation. He had lifted the tank’s lid to show me the system he used to sparge his brews, an ingenious series of perforated copper tubes that VanGlad himself devised and built to convert what had been a piece of secondhand gear from a defunct dairy operation into a workable piece of brewing equipment.
What VanGlad has done is take the very idea of “the next level” to, well, the next level. Five years before, he had been a senior at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York, studying supply chain management and entrepreneurship. He and his roommate brewed beer for fun, a way of passing time during the long, cold winters in the northern part of the state.
In the spring of 2011, VanGlad founded Tundra Brewery as a way to combine his education with his love of good beer. For someone from Canada who is accustomed to the seemingly impenetrable thicket of regulations about where and how beer can be sold, this initiative is astounding. In New York, it’s simple. “Since I’m a micro,” VanGlad explained, “I can sell at farmers’ markets. I just fill out an off-premises sales permit. And I need a tasting permit as well, since I give out samples.” When he was starting up, he said, “the federal government came by to check out my tanks,” officially for tax purposes. He added, “I think that they just checked me out to see that I knew what I was doing.” Otherwise the government left him alone.
Tundra was very much a family affair. Ninety percent of the barley VanGlad used was grown in their nearby fields. A hop bed behind the brewing building, planted with Cascade and Brewer’s Gold, gave him 20 percent of his hops: the rest he bought from other farmers in New York State. And when it came time to bottle, his parents were roped in to help, as was his girlfriend, who also designed the labels for the beer.
Because of the size of his brew kettle, VanGlad could brew a maximum of two hundred U.S. gallons at a time. A typical batch for him would be five American barrels’ worth of beer, 155 U.S. gallons in all. When we visited him at Tundra in early November, he had already made and sold twenty-five batches in 2012.
On a typical Friday night, when the rest of us might be out with friends enjoying a pint, VanGlad would be loading cases of beer into his truck. Then, at three Saturday morning, he and his girlfriend would clamber into the front seat and take off on the three-hour trek to what he refers to simply as “the city.” Their first stop would be Union Square in lower Manhattan, home to the largest farmers’ market in New York City. VanGlad would drop his girlfriend off there, then head uptown to the smaller market in Inwood, Manhattan’s northernmost neighborhood, where he sold Tundra’s products. At the end of the day he would pack up, head downtown to pick his girlfriend up and drive home, arriving at around ten at night, nineteen hours after they left. VanGlad sold to a few restaurants and bars in New York City, and he also hit a few local farmers’ markets, but the bulk of his sales came from this grueling weekly jaunt. Because New York City’s Green Markets, as its farmers’ markets are officially referred to, will only let farmers sell in them what they themselves have grown, VanGlad had the Big Apple’s beer-swilling locavores to himself. On a good Saturday, they could sell twenty cases of beer. His customers were “beer enthusiasts, people who don’t want something that’s just manufactured. Sometimes we get a beer snob who tells me what I’m doing wrong,” he said. “I never get tired of that,” he added with a laugh.
Tundra produced four beers: a woodsy ale featuring maple syrup from the family sugar bush; a red ale using honey from their own hives; Viper India Pale Ale, so named, said VanGlad because “it packs a bite”; and a tasty brown ale. A new gluten-free beer was in the works to take advantage of the sorghum his family had harvested the fall before. In future, he hoped to malt his own barley. When we visited, he had to drive his barley — he was growing six row — three hours to a company in Massachusetts, the only custom maltster in the eastern United States. (I don’t know if the crazy schedule got to him, but the last time I heard from Mark, he had decided to give up brewing and focus on the maple syrup side of the business.)
After a night in Oneonta, home of yet another small liberal arts college, we began our trek north to Clayton and then home. I’d been trying to touch base with Mike at the boat museum about my barrel. It hadn’t shown up yet, but he had left instructions with the museum’s receptionist to give us the barrel when we fetched up there if he wasn’t around.
On the way, we made a brief stop in a town called Morrisville, where I paid a visit to another Cornell ag rep, Steve Miller. His job is to field queries from people interested in getting into hops production, and he gets a steady stream of phone calls and e-mails from people who are interested in growing them. Not just from New York State, either. People in Ontario and as far away as New Brunswick contact him, looking for advice. Right now, interest outstrips expertise.
Morrisville is in Madison County, which, Miller said, had once been the heart of the state’s hop-growing region. Many of the impressive houses we saw, great wooden Victorians so embellished with gingerbread that they looked like decorated cakes, were paid for by hops. As had been the case in Prince Edward County with barley in the old days, a single season’s crop could buy one of those houses back in the 1880s and ’90s. Something like a hundred thousand people used to work in the harvest, drawn from the local area and coming out of cities such as Syracuse and even New York itself. Prohibition killed the hops industry, as it did so much of the brewing sector, and with the northwestern states coming to dominate hops growing, it’s been a very long time recovering. Today, there are eighty hops growers statewide, though that number is way up from even a few years ago.
One of the biggest challenges in reviving the hops trade is finding workers to pick them. Most people don’t want a job that only lasts five weeks. Miller led us from his office on the outskirts of Morrisville to a farm about a mile away to see one possible solution, a hop-picking machine. I had hopes of a machine with long metal fingers that actually picked, but the reality was a little more mundane. You hack down the vines then feed them into this thing — imagine a combine without wheels — on a conveyor belt. Choppers inside hack up the vines, and then somehow, I have no idea how, the leaves and vines go one way and the hops, now shaken loose, tumble down another conveyor belt and pop out the side. Built in Germany, and painted the same gray color as Wehrmacht vehicles in old war movies, it cost $30,000 secondhand.
What intrigued me the most about New York State was the degree to which the government was instigating so many of the changes as a way of helping, well, farmers in the short term, but consumers in the longer run. A farm beer law would be a boost for farmers in any state or province, especially given the growing interest in local products. And it would be a boon to beer drinkers. But will it ever happen? It seems hard to believe. As for selling beer at farmers’ markets, it’s such a great idea that I can only start to imagine the ways bureaucrats outside the state would try to block it.
I CAME AWAY from New York State with a lot: ideas, impressions, even free beer. But not, alas, with my barrel. It showed up in Clayton early the next week. There it languished while I tried to figure out a way to get it. I really didn’t want to make a trip just for it — that was why I had set up all those meetings in the first place. I finally prevailed on a friend’s father-in-law, a Texan named Tommy, who lived near Clayton and would be delighted to help. The keg finally made its way across the border in early December. One sleety Sunday not long before Christmas, we drove across town to pick it up.
It was so darned cute. But so small. I figured about ten and a half inches long by eight inches or so in diameter at its widest point. Baby’s first beer barrel, I thought. I kissed it and cradled it in my arms. I had been told it was from Minnesota, but when I read the brochure that came with it, I was surprised that this bonny wee semi-demi-pin seemed to have been “cooped,” for I assume that is what a cooper does, south of the Mason–Dixon Line. In my mind I had created an image of this mercurial Swede deep in the woods of Minnesota, boiling oak staves and yelling things over the phone at the guys in Michigan like “Yoost a minute, you danged wolverine. No one tells Sven Svenson how to make a barrel!” Now I had to replace him in my fantasies with a bearded mountain man in bib overalls.
Following the instructions, I filled my barrel with hot water and dropped in a sterilizing tablet. It was supposed to soak for three days, and in fact, they tell you to never let it dry out. Anyone who has a wooden boat goes through a process like this each spring — it’s called “taking up.” The wet wood will slowly swell and become absolutely watertight, and, I hoped, airtight as well. Once that was done, everything would be ready for brewing my perfect keg.