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Land
farmer-brewers are growing
a new crop of truly local beers.
Story by Joshua M. Bernstein
52 imbibemagazine.com ~ march/april 2013
Terry Manier
Nate Tilley on the farm
at Oregon’s Agrarian Ales.
may/june 2015 ~ imbibemagazine.com 53
ne bone-chilling Sunday in January, with snow frosting
New York City, I boarded a train bound for gluttony.
Some 30 miles north, I de-trained and took a cab that
wound through rural roads to Blue Hill at Stone Barns,
America’s preeminent farm-to-table restaurant. On
the farmstead, fruits and vegetables are grown, and
chickens, cows and pigs roam. Tonight, the swine would headline
Blue Hill’s tenth, and final, Sausage and Beer dinner.
Over the evening pig appeared in every permutation, from paper-thin charcuterie to lardons anointed with oyster foam. Beer-wise, there were freeflowing glasses of KelSo’s bone char–infused winter
lager, Captain Lawrence’s salty-sour blueberry gose
and Good Nature’s smoky Scotch ale, a curiously
delicious lot of beers that shared one commonality:
they were each brewed with regionally grown grains
from Massachusetts’ Valley Malt. By plate and pint,
the feast was fiercely local, paying dividends in flavor. “Valley Malt has more structure, nuance and
integrity than grains I get from anywhere else,” says
KelSo brewmaster Kelly Taylor.
For restaurants, cooking local means visiting a
farmers’ market. Breweries face a tougher task. From
global conglomerates to garage nanobreweries, everyone sources hops, grains and yeast strains from hundreds, if not thousands, of miles afield. “Local” beer
often comes with a Bigfoot-size carbon footprint.
Crop by crop, though, the ground is shifting. To
create brews with clear terroir, brewers have begun
growing barley, hops and fruit, as well as harvesting
yeast strains and building farmstead breweries. For
brewers lacking green thumbs or extra acreage, hop
farms have fanned out from coast to coast, and malthouses are seeking out origin-specific heritage grains.
“We take something you’re calling a local product and
make it truly local,” says Brian Simpson, cofounder of
Asheville, North Carolina’s Riverbend Malt House.
The notion is catching on nationwide. In Oregon,
Agrarian Ales exclusively uses estate-grown hops,
while Washington’s Bale Breaker is housed in a hop
field. New York’s Plan Bee makes sour ales from
state-grown ingredients, and Maine’s Oxbow makes
farmhouse-style saisons on a real farm. Moreover,
start-ups such as Michigan’s Hop Head Farms and
North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Hops are loosening
Washington’s and Oregon’s bitter dominance.
Seeds of Change
54 imbibemagazine.com ~ may/june 2015
Photos courtesy Rogue Ales & Spirits
The Pacific Northwest is synonymous with the fragrant, flavorful hops that fuel modern pale ales and
IPAs, with Washington’s Yakima Valley accounting
for some 75 percent of domestic production. During the late 19th century, though, New York State was
America’s hoppy epicenter, with a thriving Wisconsin industry as well.
What about Michigan? That question concerned
Jeff and Bonnie Steinman, self-professed “lifelong
plant fanatics, career horticulturists and craft-beer
geeks.” Around 2008, Bonnie’s cousin was planning
a Lansing brewery. “They were looking for sources
for hops and wondering if they would grow well in
Michigan,” Jeff recalls.
Back then, fire and natural disasters caused hop
prices to skyrocket, thrusting the brewing industry
into panic mode. The couple decided to experiment.
A friend loaned them land, and the twosome tested
13 different hops, finding that American hybrids and,
to some extent, German cultivars fared well. (English
hops? Not so much.)
Emboldened, in the summer of 2011 they partnered with Nunzino Pizza—an investor in Chicago’s
Revolution Brewing—and founded Hop Head Farms,
situated in southwestern Michigan’s Hickory Corners. In 2012, they planted 15 acres of hops and built
the first phase of their processing facility. This was
no small investment: infrastructure costs for irrigation and trellises ran $15,000—per acre. “If you’re not
already a farmer and don’t have equipment, you’re
getting in deep real quick,” Jeff says. In 2013, they
planted another 15 acres of hops and built the facility’s second phase.
From the get-go, Michigan brewpubs and big
breweries supported Hop Head. Founders features
the flowers in its Harvest Ale, and Bell’s adds them to
its Midwestern Pale Ale and Kalamazoo IPA. These
native hops are not the same old stuff. Chinooks
“seem to have a Michigan terroir,” Jeff says. “It’s less
piney, with more pineapple and tropical fruit.”
Hop farms are taking root countrywide. In New
York, Dutchess Hops grows everything from earthy
Fuggles to floral Centennials. Minnesota’s Hippity
Hops Farms cultivates organic Cascade hops, while
Colorado’s Rising Sun Farms and Misty Mountain
Hop Farm supply the likes of Left Hand and AC Golden—Colorado Native Lager is truth in advertising.
On the flipside, some breweries dig farming. Sierra Nevada raises hops and barley, which go into
its Estate Ale, and Bell’s produces barley on its 80acre Michigan farm. Oregon’s Rogue operates several farms filled with hops, rye, barley, jalapeños and
pumpkins. As with Hop Head, Rogue’s agricultural
pursuits were spurred by the hop market’s collapse.
“We couldn’t tell [brewmaster] John ‘More Hops’
Top: John Maier shoulders a windrow
of swathed rye at Rogue Farms;
Bottom: jalapeños at Rogue Farms.
may/june 2015 ~ imbibemagazine.com 55
Top: John Maier inspects a row of
Freedom hops at Rogue Farms in
Oregon; Bottom: Brian Simpson
works the grain at Riverbend
Malt House in North Carolina.
56 imbibemagazine.com ~ may/june 2015
Maier that he couldn’t put as many hops in his beer,” recalls Rogue president
Brett Joyce. Today’s harvest totally fuels Rogue Farms–brand beers, including 7
Hop IPA, Chipotle Ale and Good Chit Pilsner, while every Rogue brew contains
some homegrown hops and barley. “Beer has just as powerful of a terroir story as
wine,” Joyce says. Rogue does not brew on the farm—more on breweries that do
in a bit—but it does operate a malthouse, transforming its grains into brew-ready
malt. “If we can figure out how to do it ourselves, we’ll do it ourselves,” Joyce says.
Malt is mainly produced by several agricultural behemoths with little connection to brewers. In contrast, small malthouses (the Craft Maltsters Guild
counts 20 North American members) are bespoke, aligning with farmers and
tailoring malts to brewers’ needs. “Our relationship with the brewers is so personal,” says Riverbend’s Simpson, who counts little guys (Fonta Flora, Fullsteam)
and giants (Sierra Nevada, New Belgium) as clients. “We meet with every brewer
to talk about their beers and see what we can do to impact a flavor profile.”
Simpson’s malts are made with North Carolina–grown barley, wheat and
rye, including the Wrens Abruzzi variety that’s been grown in the South since
the Civil War. “We want our region to be recognized for a flavor profile,” says
Simpson, whose business was inspired by an observation: Why were brewers
not using North Carolina grain? With consumers’ heightened emphasis on locality, “having the malt come from close by the brewery helps brewers tell a
story,” he says.
Narratives abound, from Maine’s Blue Ox Malthouse to Pennsylvania’s Deer
Creek Malthouse and to Texas’ Blacklands Malt, which will custom-smoke its
malts with your preferred wood. Since small-batch malts can’t compete on
cost, there’s a focus on quality and flavor. “Everything that goes into a bag looks,
smells and tastes spectacular,” he says. “I’ll put my pilsner malt against anyone’s
pilsner malt on the planet.”
Old Macdonald Had a Brewery
Top: Courtesy Rogue Ales & Spirits. Bottom: Johnny Autry
For much of the last 150 years, brewing has been an urban pursuit. As the industrial revolution led to teeming metropolises, folks settled in cities, where
breweries stitched into the urban fabric. Now, a reverse migration is leading
brewers back to the land.
Maryland’s Milkhouse Brewery at Stillpoint Farms grows wheat and hops,
while Austin’s Jester King farmhouse brewery inoculates beers with wild Hill
Country yeast. In Oregon, Wolves & People’s farmhouse ales contain yeast cultivated from the estate’s oldest plum tree, and Logsdon Farmhouse Ales makes
Belgian-style saisons in a red barn. Colorado’s Oskar Blues runs the Hops and
Heifers farm (it also recently bought a western North Carolina farm), and this
summer Flying Dog will unveil Virginia’s Farmworks Brewery.
For Evan Watson, opening a farm brewery was a backup plan. After graduating college in 2007, a recording contract took the musician to NYC. Between
concerts he took up homebrewing. When the hop shortage hit—sound familiar?—Watson started researching hop cultivation. By growing every brewing
ingredient, he hypothesized, “I thought I could make a quality beer for a lesser
price and compete with larger conglomerates,” he says, laughing.
In 2009, Watson moved north of New York City to Westchester County,
where he nabbed a part-time job at Captain Lawrence. While learning the brewing ropes he continued touring, even opening for Def Leppard. The experience
disheartened him. “I was chewed up and spit out by the music business,” he
says. “I wanted daily gratification.”
By fall 2013, Watson and his wife Emily launched Fishkill’s Plan Bee Farm
Brewery with a mission of making beer with 100 percent New York ingredients.
(For good reason: New York State’s recently created Farm Brewer License permits breweries to sell beer by the glass, provided they use a percentage of New
York–grown ingredients. This has led to an upswing in hop farms, maltsters and
farm-based brewers.) “It’s a test plot, a petri dish of this concept to source everything as local as possible,” Watson says of his single-acre brewery.
His idiosyncratic, rigorously seasonal beers—mainly fermented with yeast
cultured from his apiaries’ raw honey—include the dandelion-driven Dandeliaison, barrel-aged sours flavored with indigenous fruit, and the evocative Leaf
SmOak, a fall specialty crammed with malt smoked over burning oak leaves.
“As a farm brewery, you’re literally attached to the land,” says Watson, who is
relocating Plan Bee to a 25-acre spread with the goal of growing hops and grain.
ten
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Try
Bale Breaker
Topcutter IPA
Given the brewery’s headquarters
on a Yakima Valley hop farm, it’s a
no-brainer that Bale Breaker focuses
on aroma-forward ales. Topcutter—
named after equipment that removes
bines from trellises—is a resinous,
tropical IPA with relatively restrained
bitterness.
Ruhstaller
1881 Indigenous
California Red Ale
The agrarian-focused Sacramento
brewery, which operates a hopyard,
exclusively uses Golden State–grown
malts and hops in this floral, gently
sweet red ale.
Jester King
Noble King
Based on a farm outside Austin,
this Texas brewery uses wild yeast
captured from the surrounding Hill
Country in its expressive, farmhousestyle ales. Noble King is dry and
generously hopped, with a funky
undercurrent.
Rockmill Brewery
Dubbel
Situated on a former horse farm in
southeastern Ohio (where the water’s
makeup mimics that of Belgium’s
Wallonia), Rockmill specializes in
organic, Belgian-style ales. The
earthy, caramel-forward dubbel is
drenched in flavors of figs, raisins
and cherries.
Rogue Farms
OREgasmic Ale
Pay attention to the pun: From water
to yeast, hops and grain (grown
by Rogue), every ingredient in
OREgasmic hails from, you guessed
it, Oregon. The ale is fruity and
floral, with a sweet and sturdy malt
backbone.
continued on page 58
may/june 2015 ~ imbibemagazine.com 57
ten
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Try
continued
Bell’s Brewery
Midwestern
Pale Ale
Head 90 minutes north of Kalamazoo,
Michigan, and you’ll find an 80-acre
barley farm that fuels several Bell’s
beers, including this balanced pale
ale that emphasizes floral, herbal
aromatics.
Fullsteam
Summer Basil
Farmhouse Ale
“Plow-to-pint beer” is the operating
principle for Fullsteam, which
incorporates North Carolina–grown
ingredients into many releases,
especially this peppery hot-weather
seasonal packed with local basil.
The Wild Beer Co.
Somerset Wild
Somerset, England’s Wild Beer
cultures wild yeast and bacteria from
the region’s renowned apple orchards,
and uses the microcritters to create
this complex, appealingly tart elixir.
It’s got a lovely lemony quality.
Blue Mountain
Full Nelson Virginia
Pale Ale
On its farmstead in Virginia’s Blue
Ridge Mountains, the Virginia brewery
grows the Cascade hops that supply
its crisp, spicy flagship pale with a
floral nose. Buy it by the can.
Logsdon
Farmhouse ales
Seizoen Bretta
58 imbibemagazine.com ~ may/june 2015
Growing Pains
As American breweries reproduce like rabbits, with 3,200-plus operational facilities and 1.5 new ones debuting daily, there’s a tightening competition for
raw material. Growing your own, or starting a farm or malthouse, may seem
like the right path to self-reliance. Fact is, farming is risky business. “We’ve
definitely gotten to know Mother Nature well,” says Rogue’s Joyce. The farms
flood nearly every year, complicating matters for workers feeding livestock.
“It’s stuff like that you never think about when you enter this project,” he says.
Beyond logistics, there’s the issue of variable yields. Underlining that, last
year’s hot summer led to a lower-than-expected hop harvest. While the farms
supply Rogue with around 15 percent of its annual grain needs, and nearly 40
percent of its required hops, Joyce doesn’t foresee the brewery going all in on
agriculture. “It’s a risk we’re not ready to make,” he says.
At Valley Malt, cofounder Andrea Stanley has no trouble transforming,
say, purple corn, pumpkin seeds or rare Polish Danko rye into fermentables
for brewers. The trouble is sourcing enough high-quality ingredients. “You
have to find a farmer who knows what they’re doing, and have them integrate
the crops into the farm,” she says, noting that the Northeast needs additional
infrastructure: combines, silos, seed cleaners.
Upending the status quo takes time. After all, America didn’t become a
nation of IPA aficionados overnight. From farming to end product, creating
agricultural supply chains is complex. The undertaking requires hard labor,
blind faith and money, money, money. “Our hops and barley are definitely the
most expensive that we will ever use,” says Rogue’s Joyce. But brewing’s farm
movement is about more than dollars and cents.
Recent years have witnessed a flattening affect in beer. As regional ingredients become an international commodity, brewers from Oregon to England and Australia have started making pale ales and IPAs that taste awfully
similar. Homegrown hops, heritage grains and indigenous yeast strains give
brewers the building blocks to create truly distinct beers that speak of the
soil, of a specific place. And by visiting a farm brewery, a beer drinker can see
beer’s journey from ground to glass vividly illustrated. With his new farmhouse brewery, says Plan Bee’s Watson, “we’re going to teach people where
beer comes from.”
Terry Manier
To find Logsdon, head due south of
Hood River, Oregon, and look for the
red barn where the brewers make
multifaceted, medal-winning sour
ales and saisons. Our favorite
is the dry, fruity and funked-up
Seizoen Bretta, which is spiked with
Brettanomyces yeast.
For the longest time, peppers were favored at Oregon’s family-run Crossroads Farm, north of Eugene. Then, in 2002, brothers Nate and Ben Tilley
planted hop bines on their folks’ land. Over the years, weekend-based agronomic trials “transformed into us asking if we could turn the barn our parents
weren’t using into a brewery,” Nate says of what became Agrarian Ales, which
opened in 2013. The brewery’s beers, which contain farm-reared hops, transcend the farmhouse-brewery stereotype of funky and rustic saisons. “For us,
the farmhouse style is more about the connection of the ingredients to the
beer,” says Tilley of Agrarian’s revolving seasonal brews.
Golden ales are infused with just-pressed apple juice, cream ales contain
handpicked Asian pears and porters are spiced with chipotles. The pepper
bounty provides Agrarian with a unique opportunity. “We’re redefining the
stigma that chile beers are liquid hot sauce,” Tilley says of beers like the poblano-flavored ¡Poblamo! amber ale.
In Washington, hops have long defined life at B.T. Loftus Ranches. Back
in 1932, Kevin Smith and Meghann Quinn’s great-grandparents founded
the family hop farm that’s now run by their older brother, Patrick. Meghann
and her husband, Kevin Quinn, and younger brother were keen homebrewers. Wouldn’t it be natural to start a brewery on the farm? “There was always
something pulling us back,” Meghann says. “The farm is part of who we are.”
The trio took down three acres of the farm’s Field 41 and built Bale Breaker
Brewing, which is surrounded by fields of Cascade hops. “We’re the only commercial brewery located on a commercial hop farm,” says Kevin Quinn, who
oversees sales. Meghann handles marketing, while brother Kevin brews hopforward beers such as the grassy, citrusy Field 41 Pale Ale, fruity and floral
Topcutter IPA and, come harvest, America’s freshest wet-hop beers. “It takes
about five minutes to get the hops from the picking machine to the brew kettle,” Meghann says. “It’s as fresh as you can get.”
Rogue Farms’
OREgasmic Ale.
may/june 2015 ~ imbibemagazine.com 59