Should Northeast-Grown Hops Be Renamed? / Brewing an IPA with Century-Feral New York Wild Hops

Running a brewery on a real actual operating farm, complete with its own hop yard, I'm very much interested in the quality of local (northeast) hops, and putting them to the best possible use. I can't wait to see what comes of the resurgence of the industry in this region. Of course, the quality of the local hops that I've brewed with so far can vary widely, which is to be expected. I don't take that as a knock on local growing: many of these are from incredibly small operations, basically hobbyists, and local hops are much like a fledgling homebrew scene: some surprisingly good, some need some troubleshooting. But done right, I've seen promising cones.

And generally, where it gets really interesting is that everything I've tasted, when turned into beer, is quite different from its namesake varieties grown in the northwest. So here's something that I think will become a major question in the beer community in the near future: should hops from new regions like the northeast, which diverge dramatically from the character of their western counterparts, be renamed as something new and unique? Are these the same hops? When is Cascade no longer Cascade?

I'm not quite bold enough to raise such a question and then try to answer it myself right now, but I do hope to see some discussion on this subject soon. It is the time to start thinking about such things. Hop farms, particularly in New York, are teetering at the threshold. Right now, many of these farms are prepping for their third-year harvest, an important milestone in the lifespan of a hop yard. Hops generally require a few years before they hit peak maturity, and you'll often hear that the third harvest is the one where they really come into their own. Very few serious operations in New York have been around much longer than this. The same, I imagine, is true for New England in general. As far as we know, the hop farm at Kent Falls Brewery on Camps Road Farm is the only commercial hop growing operation presently in the state of Connecticut (we're also the first farm brewery in the state of Connecticut). Our hops are, in fact, entering their third year. I'll be very interested to see how they perform in 2015. (No pressure whatsoever, Farmer John).

But what's really, really cool and exciting to me is that there are hops growing in the northeast which have been around for far longer than any of the modern batch of hop farms. Decades before farm bills were being contemplated, decades before the craft beer movement was even a twinkle in Ken Grossman's eye, hops were growing wild in the Northeast. Because as you probably know, New York used to be hop growing capital of the Americas... before Prohibition tripped it up, and blight clotheslined it in a vicious and unfair tag-team. All across this region, derelict hop farms were abandoned, hops left to grow feral. This is fascinating to me: all over the state, and nearby states, potentially grow hops that have been wild for almost a century. Hops that may in fact be hundreds of years old, all-told. Hops that have absorbed the character of the land and made it their own. Truly unique, more-or-less native hops. Forgotten, and awaiting rediscovery.

Obercreek Farm, in Wappingers Falls, NY, found such hops growing on their property. Obercreek is one of the many small farms / growers in New York to put in just an acre or few of hops, but these weren't part of the business plan: they were already there, for what Farmer Tim estimates to be about a century, if not more. And with a hundred years to acclimate to the soil, it's no wonder they're the strongest and most aggressive growers of Obercreek's lot. Besides them growing well, I was hoping for stronger flavors than I've gotten from immature local hops, too. And in this aspect, they showed what unique regional hops are capable of. The IPA that I brewed with these New York feral hops may not be game-changing for a contemporary IPA, but it shows off the varied potential for a little-explored type of hop. The flavors were indeed stronger than other local hops I've used, and far more complex. Unique, too.

While the general framework of the recipe was that of an IPA (nothing fancy, there), this doesn't quite taste like any IPA I have ever had. The primary character is something like orange marmalade, but with less citrus. It's rounder, smoother, softer; more suited to a well-balanced pale ale than an IPA, perhaps. The flavor isn't necessarily as striking as some really juicy hop varieties, but it also fills out a spoke on the flavor wheel that I've not exactly encountered — and that sort of uniqueness is always welcome. Smooth orange marmalade: I can work with that.

And who knows what hops this wild variety originally descended from. A safe guess would be that Cluster or perhaps Brewer's Gold might be involved. Another safe guess would be that these hops were not descended from Mosaic. And in any case, they do shelter a hint of the English ancestry that might have preceded them, or at least influenced popular hops at the time, but with that 'American tang' shaping most of what's there. And whatever their background, if we brewers end up using more hops like these, we're going to need to start brainstorming some new names. East Coast Cascade or something a century older: they're just not the same.

A school near the brewery is said to have hops that have been growing wild for 300 years. Now those I really want to brew with.

Chickens and Funk: Plan Bee Farm Brewery is Growing (Slightly Bigger) and Growing (Everything)

When, like most extremely normal people, I'm dwelling on stories I haven't written yet weeks or months before I actually sit down and type anything out, I often latch onto some kind of 'hook' that seems like a good encapsulation of the story I want to tell. And so, for some time now, I figured I would open this feature by writing about how Evan Watson, brewmaster of Fishkill, NY's Plan Bee Farm Brewery, appears to be one of the nicest human beings you'll ever meet. I promise this isn't me showing my bias, because truthfully, I don't really know Evan all that well. No, it's just the take-away you'll have after chatting with him at a market on occasional weekends, and seeing him explain his beer and his brewery's mission to other curious shoppers, most of whom haven't the slightest idea what a beer produced by a tiny farm brewery with a local wild house yeast strain might be like. ("Is it a light beer?") Evan may be a bearded giant, but from making his acquaintance in the year-and-change since Plan Bee opened, I had decided that this incredibly humble, soft-spoken man is just a big old sweetie.

Evan is full of surprises, though. And given his quiet, down-playing nature, you won't learn these things easily, without some prying. That he was some kind of All-American football star way back in the day isn't that shocking. But try Googling his name and uncover his music career, which he will allude to only offhandedly, in the vaguest, most demure of terms. You will discover that he's incredibly talented in this realm as well — has, in fact, toured with some very big acts that I promise you've heard of — and you wonder: when in the world did he have time to start brewing? And at Captain Lawrence, no less, one of the Hudson Valley's greatest success stories, and undeniably the brewery with its best sour and barrel-aging program. Evan Watson has some impressive credentials.

And yet, right now, Plan Bee Farm Brewery consists of little more than a small shed behind the home of Evan and his wife Emily. (At least, that's how it would seem if you're thinking of a brewery in the traditional sense). Inside the shed are a couple micro barrels, one normal-size barrel of solera lambic, four Speidel fermentors, and one of the simplest brew-houses that I've ever seen. True, Plan Bee is only running a one barrel (32 gallon) system currently, leading to the rare situation where a professional brewer can drag his equipment out into the yard and clean it with a garden hose. Even for its size, Plan Bee keeps things basic: I've seen any number of homebrew set-ups more elaborate than this.

As anyone in the industry knows, 1 bbl per batch is not a lot of beer. Almost anyone, including those with a 1 bbl system themselves, will tell you that it's a wildly uneconomical business model in the long term. But Evan's ambitions are a bit outside the norm of most volume-oriented brewers. He describes the current brewery as a Petri dish. Plan Bee will grow, and likely soon, but volume will never be the focus. Evan told me he doesn't think he'll need anything larger than a 5 bbl brewhouse for the next phase. Not because Evan doesn't think he could sell more beer, but because he doesn't think he could produce more beer. The operation is unprecedented in the state of New York, as the only brewery to currently make every one of its beers with all-NY ingredients. Not only are the hops and barley grown in the Empire State — many of the hops, in fact, are grown right in Evan's yard — but his current house yeast strain was originally plucked from Muscadine grapes growing in his backyard as well, and developed through repeated brewing sessions. Plan Bee epitomizes the farm brewery model that this state, and many others, are now pushing so hard. And, in a curious way, Plan Bee demonstrates why the farm brewery license, as it stands, may pose harsh challenges for just about any other brewery.

Evan's plans to grow Plan Bee don't follow the usual growth pattern of a nano-brewery. He told me he's currently looking for a new property: "Ideally, 15-30 acres, dedicating most of it to grain growing, and probably just an acre of hops." Curiously, rather than growing significantly larger in volume, Evan plans to grow more... local. With a new location, and expanded farmland, he hopes that Plan Bee will source every ingredient, and every step of the process, from its own property. The new Plan Bee Farm Brewery, whenever it arrives, will be much more than a tasting room next to some tanks: there will be a larger apiary, a malthouse, hop-oast, small orchard, large garden, and more.

I have often wondered if the Farm Brewery Bill in New York is overly-ambitious. It seems pretty clear at this point that it is going to be a huge challenge to make it work as written, however wonderful of an effort in concept. I have debated with many people in the industry if, given the current capacity for growing malt and hops in the state, it's possible for the intended regulations to be sustainable in the timeframe allotted (60% NY-state ingredients by 2018). Just a couple small-to-medium size farm breweries would quickly eat up the entire state's projected resources, to say nothing of its existing resources. Brewers are all very much counting on this licensing intervention to inspire supply for the undeniable cliff of demand, which looms... close. We're counting on a mad rush of producers to fill what has been highlighted as a glaring void.

Way ahead of everyone else, though, Evan's sort of ambition is personal. I didn't get the sense that his plans have much to do with business or licensing or market differentiation at all. It's simply his vision for the brewery — and farm — he'd like to run. He's passionate about developing the terroir of beer in this way. I don't think Evan wants to brew "local" beer so that he can slap that word on the label. I think Evan simply wants to brew beer with things that he grew, that he knows, that he tended to at every step of the way. Because to him, that is the beer. Not the recipe. Not the equipment. Not whatever it is a janitor brewmaster does.

"Growing, developing, and processing your own ingredients allows for a nearly infinite possibilities," Evan tells me later. "Brewing is even more agriculturally based than wine-making, yet we've lost that connection in this country. If you went to a vineyard in Napa or Sonoma and they said they source their ingredients exclusively from other countries, you would laugh in their face. Almost every other brewery in this country is essentially ordering from the same catalog. I feel the ingredients I source myself can be fresher, less-handled, more distinct, and entirely proprietary."

This also sounds like a ludicrous amount of work.

Two buckets of fresh hops go into the kettle for "Hop Wild."

Evan tells me he has a habit of acquiring hobbies. He says he likes distilling things down to their essence, understanding what makes them tick. Just for the sake of knowing how things work, from what I can gather of his quiet musings as we add wet hops to the boil. So when he makes a beer, he wants to craft it through every step of the process. He's brewing a weird hybrid of a beer the day we chat, with two large buckets of wet Cascades from a local farmer, but rather than a standard IPA, he intends to pitch a "weird cocktail of every yeast and blend I had floating around." I have no idea what the result will be, but it sounds guaranteed to be fascinating. The hop cones are so large we spend a good half an hour breaking them into chunks to toss into the kettle. He tells me he "has a million ideas." He wants to make this new, future farm brewery wrapped around growth, around beer, and also music. A place people can go to absorb all these things. It's sounding like a pretty chill place.

Which, I would say, is a good idea considering his current situation: a brewery in his backyard, and a retail 'farmstand' in his front yard, open Saturday afternoons only. The only other place to find the beer? The local farmer's market, on Sundays. Bottles only, in each case. It's not like there's a whole lot to go around. If you're going to find Evan's beer, those are the options.

Plan Bee has released a number of well-received sour beers in recent weeks: Brass Tacks, a barrel-aged golden sour, and two fruit variations of that base beer: Amour, on strawberries, and Precious, on apricots. The Watsons are used to beer collectors and drinkers of all types hanging out around his property, but the line of cars out of his driveway at 9 o'clock in the morning for that recent release of Precious was a first. When Evan and Emily opened the farmstand to customers at noon, the beer sold out in under an hour. A few weeks later, Plan Bee released Comb, a blended sour. The line started before 8 am this time. Though twice as much beer was available for this batch, the Watsons lowered the bottle limited significantly from the previous release. The whole batch still sold out in the same amount of time.

The small scale helps, and certainly, selling out a batch in 15 minutes isn't totally inconceivable when you're making such a small volume in the first place. But the beer is getting out there, popping up in states far away from Evan's little farmstand. A new location will have to cement Plan Bee's accessibility and aesthetic. His roots to the farmland, the wild yeast he favors, spices fresh from the garden. It'll have to be comfortable, as one would imagine such a place, I figure. It's a good problem to have, shared by many of today's best brewers, even if they started, at their smallest, still many times larger than Plan Bee. I'm quite excited by the prospects of this operation, especially given this feeling I get that Evan won't fail to deliver on his ambitions.

I ask him to describe what his ideal brewery would be, beyond just all the farming and creeping bines. There hangs a solitary acoustic guitar on the wall of the brew-shed, for when friends visit during a brew session. Out front, by the driveway, a hammock stretches between trees, bushes arched over the path that leads to the house, chickens racing across the yard. It is the kind of place that is, from the very first impression, extremely charming.

Evan starts telling me a bit about his former football career, of all things — and, not being much of a football person myself, I have no idea where this is going, or if I will understand whatever metaphor he's working at.

After games, he says, he would sit with his father at a pub in Ohio, and have dinner with big imperial pints from Great Lakes Brewing Co. He says he could recall nothing more satisfying after a game. It just felt right, after all that harsh physical exertion. I can relate to that.

Jumping back to the present, he says maybe he wants to learn how to paint. He has this vision for this massive, intricate piece of artwork that will be the focus of the new brewery space, the only piece of artwork in the taproom / hangout area.

"I want to learn how to paint in that old style of dark, romantic, classical oil paintings. And I want to have it be this big intricate mural painting of Vikings."

"Vikings?"

"Yeah. A Viking ship crashing ashore, spilling over with nude Nordic warriors. Pillaging a village. Decimating and decapitating their beach-bound opposition with giant broadswords. "

I'm laughing pretty hard at this point, not entirely sure if he's serious.

"And really vibrantly hued blood, just spraying everywhere. Blood-red paint is splattered all over the canvas... even on the gold frame itself. Some on the wall next to where it’s mounted. Really multi-dimensional."

Other ideas for how he can bring community involvement into the open-space, festive nature of the farm, this "cross-section of the Viking’s mythological Valhalla with a Mississipi Delta BBQ," include: "feats of strength" in the yard. In the hall, there will be only one enormous long wooden table, covered in animal skins, where drinkers can sit. Here I was expecting a pastoral utopia, some neo-farmer paradise subtly integrating the finest in New York brewing and environmentalism, and Evan has his mind set on smashing goblets on the ground at the end of a night, and, I don't know, throwing javelins at wild boars, probably. Okay, surprising, maybe, but it sounds pretty damn awesome. It will certainly be unique in the area, whatever ends up happening with Evan's plans.

"My family is from northern Scotland," he says, by way of explanation. His ancestors might quibble with the Viking-specific imagery, but I'm seeing some logic to it all. The beer as a reward after a hard day's labor, and connecting that tactile labor to the product it results in. Beer, as tied to the real and physical. Maybe it's just the misleadingly quirky name of the brewery and its elegant logo that threw me off from the start.

Why shouldn't farm brewing be gritty and blunt, anyway? There is certainly a violence inherent in farming, and maybe in brewing, too. As we clean out the mash tun and brew kettle in the yard with a hose, later, I ask Evan about a dried snakeskin hanging up on the fence at the vegetable garden.

"We've had, like, three different snakes attempt to invade the chicken coop this summer," Evan tells me. "The other week there was a huge snake that kept eating all the eggs before we could get to them. We were getting like six to eight eggs every morning before that."

One morning, he woke to Emily sounding the alarm: the snake was back, and it had, once again, eaten all the eggs. This time, Evan moved fast enough to catch it.

"I grabbed a flathead shovel and smashed the thing in half. There was blood, and yolk, just... spewing out of it."

So, to crush an enemy's skull, you would grab it like this...

Unlike most brewers catching wild local yeast strains, Evan never sent his off to a lab, or even tried to isolate one single strain himself. Not that he took this route based on some adherence to lofty principals of naturalism, but because he found there was no reason to.

"Brewers are so afraid of Brettanomyces and talk about it as if it's this unstoppable monster, but really, Saccharomyces is the hungriest, dominating, most competitive of yeasts," he says. "That's why basically all pure-culture brewer's strains ended up being Saccharomyces. It's what wins out in the end."

Evan has used a few commercial cultures in the past, mostly favoring Wyeast's 3711 French Saison, but he'll likely phase out commercial yeast entirely at this point. Four different wild cultures make up the majority of his repertoire now, all isolated from around the farm property: a peach tree yeast strain, strawberry yeast, Muscadine grape yeast, and a new culture of honey yeast that Evan is currently developing.

Wild yeast isn't known for its versatility, so it may seem like a lot of effort to turn these raw, feral critters into something clean and consistent enough to base all the brewery's beers around. It probably is, but Evan isn't averse to hard work, clearly. I remember Tachiniki, one of Evan's earliest beers fermented with a wild fruit culture (peach), from when I was first encountering Plan Bee at the farmer's market, and thought it was an interesting, if very raw experiment. Much like how you might expect a first generation wild yeast culture to taste, without much aging: very yeasty, phenolic, vaguely Belgian with a bit of weird grassy funky. Not knowing much about Evan at the time, other than that he had a background at Captain Lawrence, I wasn't sure how to gauge this quirky direction, but I loved that he was trying it. And as an experimental brewer who rarely releases the same thing twice, even though they are all bottled, I figured it was a fair guess that some very cool experiments would be coming down the line.

"I'm basically recreating history with this brewing process," Evan explains. By which he means, instead of sending it off to a lab, he just kept pitching his favorite Muscadine grape culture over and over, spending far more time and resources steering the yeast than most brewers would be willing to. But as the Saccharomyces in the culture out-competed Brettanomyces, Evan noticed that the pellicles stopped showing up. The hint of lactic tang from lingering stubborn bacteria got less pronounced. Through repeated top-cropping and re-pitching, Evan says the culture has become "incredibly clean." And after trying one of Plan Bee's recent farmhouse brews fermented with the stuff, he's right. It's nothing like the yeasty, phenolic culture that I tasted in Tachiniki a year ago. Sharing a recent batch of Farmstand Ale (#3) with friends, later, we decide this particular yeast tastes like nothing else we've encountered. It truly is unique to Evan's tiny operation — and it's fantastic.

When I talk to a lot of brewers — especially those in this new wave of nanobrewery openings — I can't quite figure out what their motivation is beyond "Making beer for a living sounds sweet"... and the results can be all over the place. Some brewers just want to make beer. Some brewers, perhaps, just want to drink beer. Some want to focus on a certain type of beer. Some want to make the most refined, precisely-calibrated beer. I don't think I've encountered another brewer with Evan's exact goals. Some of his beers may be a bit more raw than others, but that's part of what he's doing, and his small scale means, if you've bought the beer, then you've likely had some small connection to the man who made it. He will tell you whatever you want to know, and he will be frank.

"I've made some exceptional batches of beer, and I've made some mediocre batches of beer," he tells me. He's not being arrogant or self-deprecating, he's just observing.

If his recent releases are any indication, Plan Bee's output is sliding more and more into the 'exceptional' side of the spectrum. Evan clearly understands how to cultivate demand in the world of beer traders and roving bottle-sharers, but still seems a bit shocked, and perpetually flattered, by the sudden intensity of attention.

"When people started to come up to the stand and ask to buy a whole case, I would feel bad," Evan says. Due to the economics of small scale brewing and bottling, Plan Bee beers aren't particularly cheap. "At first I felt weird that people were spending so much on my beer. Each bottle of this one batch I brought to the farmer's market was $20, so for a whole case... you know? This one guy was trying to buy as much as he could, and I was like: 'Are you sure you want to buy all that beer, man? That's a lot of money.'"

You can't help but get the impression that Evan Watson is a really nice guy. Just... don't steal his eggs.

Announcing the First-Ever Commercially Available Bear Flavored Ale, July 11

Hello, readers of bear-flavored.com and inhabitants of the internet. I'm happy to announce that if you are interested in trying a certified Bear Flavored Ale, you now have your first chance to do so (unless you know me in real life or have previously robbed my apartment.) I realize that most of you do not live in the Hudson Valley, but for those that aren't too far away, or enjoy traveling long distances for unfamiliar and untested beer: let's party.

On Friday, July 11th, Bacchus Restaurant in New Paltz, NY, will be tapping the first keg of a batch of Bear Flavored Brett IPA, based on my recipe in the May / June issue of BYO Magazine (the full article hasn't been posted online yet.) I brewed this beer with Mike and Jason back in May on their 3 bbl system, so there'll be a few kegs of it that will pop up probably in the following week or so, if you miss the initial release. But on the 11th, we will be tapping at least one 15 gallon keg, so I figured, why not invite everyone to join in? I'll probably bring a few other assorted Bear Flavored beers from my archives to share as well.

Stop by, say hello, call me a pretentious beer snob, ask about the brewing process, whatever. Spoiler alert, though: commercial brewing ain't nothing but hoses and tri-clamps. Brewing 22x the volume that I normally brew at home doesn't actually feel all that different for the most part, in that you're basically standing around in a humid room, adding ingredients at a few key points, and then cleaning a whole bunch of stuff up. Manually dumping in multiple sacks of grain, and then hauling the wet spent stuff out of the mash tun afterwards, certainly requires a bit more endurance than at home. And like switching to any new system, it's a bit daunting to navigate the unfamiliar maze of pumps and hoses and valves. Still, I maintain that the most important elements of brewing a great beer come before and after brew-day, so we'll see how well we managed to scale up this recipe, and transition the techniques I use at home for 100% Brett IPA into the larger (relatively-speaking) commercial setting.

The main difference I've noticed so far: we used a pitch of Brett Drei from East Coast Yeast for this batch, rather than White Labs Brett Trois, because all sources (that I've seen) claim the two are identical, and ECY happened to be easier to obtain at the time, for us. But I have my doubts: the early tastes of the beer in primary haven't had the same character as any of the 100% Brett Trois IPAs I've made previously. Not a bad thing; simply different from my memories of that particularly notable yeast flavor. We'll see how it tastes once it's all carbed up, though; often, that final stage of conditioning changes everything. The beer dropped down to 1.006, and with lots of juicy Brettyness and dank dry hop, this should be a great summer drinker for a Friday night.

Remember, if you haven't ever tasted any before: 100% Brett beers really aren't sour, and not even all that funky. And if you show up wearing one of my rad t-shirts, I'll give you a high five and a pour you one from my secret stash.

Where Are All the New York Wild Ales?

What do disaster movies, romantic comedies, and the birth of hip hop all have in common? Chances are, when you're picking a location, it's gonna come down to either California or New York. The two states have long been seen as either rivals or bizarro counterparts, hotbeds of culture with recognizable skylines for aliens or monsters to blow up real good. The states are similar in many ways even outside of their manufacture of culture: huge population centers anchor the state, while the majority of their geography is farms and mountains and all sorts of pretty scenery (well, I guess California has a few more deserts than NY.)

Unfortunately, the comparison and rivalry hasn't been true of beer, at least not for the last few decades. While New York at one point dominated the industry, and supplied almost all of its hops, it's now playing an (admirably energetic) game of catch up, and the state gov is giving it a real good push. By sheer number of breweries, it's undeniable that the brewing industry in New York is exploding. At the annual TAP NY beer festival, the NY State Brewers Association announced there are currently 154 breweries. In 2011, there were only around 50 in the state. By next year, I wouldn't be surprised if the count tops 200.

Do you remember when I wrote that article about the dudes at The Brewery at Bacchus? Do you remember how I called them the Most Interesting Brewery in New York That You've Never Heard Of? Six months in, those guys are knocking out all sorts of barrel-aged Brett saisons and Berliner Weisse and such, with a number of other sours in the works — which, depending where you live in the country (or the world), may not sound all that remarkable. It's kind of hot right now, that wild stuff, right? It certainly is in sunny California.

The other week, Mike and Jason of Brewery at Bacchus Tweeted this:

Drinking an amazing @AlmanacBeer Reserve Pluot wine barrel aged sour. Great beer. New York neeeeds beers like this pic.twitter.com/VCYfuEDSnM
— Bacchus of New Paltz (@Bacchus462) April 26, 2014

First of all, I personally love the hell out of Almanac. I loved them the first I ever saw their incredible bottle design, I love their model, and I love the beer they make. The sours I've had from them have been world class. So yes, I agreed with Jason and Mike's random musing, and it got me thinking about this lament more... literally.

Where are all the sour beers in New York? And what does that say about our brewing scene?

There's a lot of analysis to be done with what's happening here in general; New York is in the middle of a paradigm shift. I still can't figure out why we're starting out so far behind other states, but regardless, we're finally going from almost nothing, the pack of the back, to a huge explosion in both state attention, local interest, and micros opening their doors. And a bunch of new businesses opening their doors all at once, as the first wave of a trend, tend to follow the most straightforward, conservative business model. Most new breweries tend to be small or medium-small; even now, there are very few in NY that even distribute throughout much of the state. I think there's at least a few articles to be gleaned from this alone, but that's just to set the context.

So almost all these breweries starting up are scrappy nanos with lots of help from friends and family and probably not a ton of funding. In fact, I'd wager that the majority of the breweries that have opened here in the last year are 3 bbl or smaller (super-nano), with probably only a handful over 10 bbl in size. (Conventional wisdom for a while has been that you need to brew at least 7 bbl to survive long term, so we'll see what this nano-craze demonstrates about that.) Now that NY is offering a farm brewery license, many are hungry to just get some beer out there. Most don't have the funding to take big risks or spend extra on things like a barrel-aging program. Most of them, frankly, are homebrewers who splurged on a license and a slightly larger system, and being a homebrewer myself, I don't mean that to sound condescending. Nano-breweries have intriguing potential, even at 20 gallon (yes, gallon) batches, regardless of the economics of it all. But it's a lot of work and very risky. I get it. 

Still, why is it starting to seem like every startup brewery's lineup has to look like some slight variation of this?

 

Not that there's anything wrong with those beers on their own, or even as a majority. For many, the appeal of craft beer is four things: creativity, variety, quality and local-ness. There are plenty of breweries bringing the 'local' angle, but frankly, 'local' can't be the only selling point of a sustainable brewery. I don't want to get into the quality debate today, just the variety and creativity stuff. For a state that's largely farms, and an industry being heavily pushed toward support of farms, it's jarring to me that there's such a lack of sours and mixed culture, farmhouse beers. There's a lot of other stuff missing too, but I'm cherry-picking one type of beer to stand in for brewery innovation (granting that just a well-brewed English mild on cask pump would seem almost as unique and exciting to me). I think it's a useful example. Wild ales strike me as a marker for a certain kind of mindset, an eagerness to break from the Same Six Styles Syndrome. And because playing with Brett & Bugs scares off a lot of brewers, a dedication to producing them regularly seems to also offer at least a slight indication that a brewer has their shit together. (Though tapping just one random batch of a sour, let's say barleywine may just be an indication that, whoops, let's not dump this one batch of infected beer if people will pay money for it?)

Maybe, I'm just really bothered by the seemingly inescapable mindset that every brewery needs to have a few styles we've silently designated as "The Beers Everyone Has to Make to Keep Average Drinkers Happy." It seems presumptuous. Is a fruity, yeasty Brett saison going to be that harder for the average person to swallow than a fruity, yeasty hefeweizen?

I have complained about this for years, loudly and often (to my friends' great delight), but never thought to put it in cold, hard statistical terms. I got curious — is anyone in New York actually regularly producing wild ales? How many brewers in New York actually have some kind of barrel program? From a quick check on Beer Advocate, the state has about as many breweries as neighbouring Pennsylvania. Off the top of my head, without even digging around, I can name at least half a dozen PA breweries regularly releasing wild ales in bottles (which signifies some level of commitment, in my opinion.) In New York, I could think of just one, Captain Lawrence, plus a few "kind-ofs" in various stages of development, or going through expansions and shifts in focus (Ithaca, who has released lots of incredible sours previously, but seems to be shifting their attention elsewhere lately.) But maybe I'm ignorant. Maybe I'm being curmudgeonly and I'm just not looking hard enough. So it's time for some crude statistical analysis.

One recent Friday night, being the hip, socially-ambitious person I am, I spent a few hours clicking through the New York brewery list on Beer Advocate, analyzing every beer brewed in New York... at least that's made it onto the site. (What, like you have something better to do on a Friday night?) Obviously, this isn't perfect methodology, but it was the only realistic and consistent methodology for the moment. We're seeking the NY-equivalent of Almanac, Ale Apothecary, Allagash, The Bruery, Cascade, Crooked Stave, Hill Farmstead, Jester King, Jolly Pumpkin, Forest & Main, Logsdon Farmhouse Ales, Lost Abbey, Night Shift, the Rare Barrel, Prairie, Russian River, Tired Hands, Yazoo, etc etc etc, where the wild-side is obvious and the doors to the farmhouse are wide open. Some very small start-ups might not have all their beers listed on Beer Advocate yet, which leads to some fuzzy categorizing, but for the sake of this article, I'm looking to broadly define "regular producers of sour / wild / farmhouse beer in NY." A beer with only two ratings and no details, that seems to have been released only once, is obviously not something that was a big push.

In addition, there are a number of breweries I'll mention that look to be branching out into these sorts of brews, which is awesome. I don't want this article to come across as overly critical, simply... observational. Even as the market becomes saturated and the Bubble stretches, it is my opinion that there is still a lot of opportunity out there. If in two years this article is completely irrelevant and seems stupid, that's a very good thing. Sound fair?

So after those hours of research, what did I end up with? Not much that I wasn't aware of before I started. The similarity of offerings by small start-up nanobreweries is seriously jarring when you start looking at page after page of them in a row.

Let's phrase it this way: say you have a friend in California and you want to show them what's going on in New York. You want to send them some beer. [How many breweries make a draft-only geuze, anyway?] In bottles, your options for funky and farmhouse fare is... still not much. There's Captain Lawrence, of course. They've had a really good barrel program for years, releasing one or two world-class wild ales a year, on average. So hopefully you can find one of those, because there are only a handful of other breweries in New York putting sours / wilds in bottles, and most of the rest are tiny, or don't seem too committed to the genre. Shmaltz releases He'Brew Funky Jewbelation annually; a blend of different barrels, Funky Jewbelation sounds like it's at least on the sour spectrum, though it's listed as a strong ale. I'm not even sure about that one, as I haven't had it myself. Scaling down considerably from there, if you're one of my neighbors, you can stop at the farmer's market to pick up one of Evan's Plan Bee Brewery creations, which are very small releases, mostly wild yeast and farmhouse-inspired stuff. Evan does a little bit of everything, but I love his mindset, and I love his "hyper-local, self-sourced" model. You've got two more options if you live in NYC, where the very very tiny brewery Big Alice seems to have bottled a few experiments, and Transmitter Brewing opened its doors literally as I was writing this article. Of all the breweries mentioned in this article, Transmitter seems most likely to have the dedication to funk that I'm looking for. But with these small guys, to re-iterate, we're kind of looking into the future: they're just getting started, and can't make enough beer to supply their own neighborhoods right now.

Elsewhere, it's not too hard to find breweries that occasionally do Berliner Weisse and Gose, which are part of a genre I'm calling 'quick sours', beers that employ the sour mash method (or something like it.) Especially if you're just looking for it on draft at the brewery — that's way more do-able. Notably, Peekskill Brewery's Simple Sour is one of the few beers that's always on tap there, and makes appearances at bars throughout the Hudson Valley and NYC. Of the dozen or so other breweries that have done quick sours in New York state, there's still hardly anyone packaging  — Poughkeepsie-area Sloop Brewing are some of the only guys regularly bottling a Berliner-ish beer that I could dig up. So your bottle hunt hasn't gotten much easier, and you'll have to be in the right place at the right time to even to fill up a growler.

What about Brett beers and not-quite sours? You don't always need the acid; maybe you just want some breezy light funk. In bottles, Ithaca and Brooklyn, two of the largest breweries in the state, just released Brett-aged beers of the Belgian bent. Ithaca is an interesting case: the new Luminous seems to be a reinvention of the retired sour ale Brute, though it's unclear how Ithaca will handle their sour program now. Since expanding the brewery, it's been difficult to tell whether they'll keep the same focus on the former barrel program; most attention seems to be on new seasonals. I've also heard that Luminous is not a full sour, but a tart Brett beer, so keep that in mind when looking to drop some acid. (Lactic and acetic acid, I mean.) For now, I'll file Ithaca tentatively under the "irregular sour producer" folder. Another big guy, Ommengang, recently released Wild at Heart, a rich, malty 100% Brett beer that most would mistake for simply another Belgian. One more wild ale option in bottles, though not very wild in the general scheme of things.

All existing brews considered, we're looking at a handful of options, and only a few breweries giving such beers regular attention. As far as my general complaint about variety, yes, there are certainly breweries experimenting and innovating in other ways, and a couple existing breweries have shown interest in embracing the funk as soon as they can. Peekskill, for one, already has a coolship and some wild ale fermenting that's likely to be incredible. Jeff O'Neil will be giving us more than a few delicious sours down the road, so you've gotta (patiently) factor that in. As will a few of the newbies. I have high hopes for Transmitter Brewing, which looks to be perhaps the first NY brewery focused mostly on farmhouse / wild ales. Also in Queens, newly-opened Finback looks to be dabbling in the realm too. I must also mention that their borough-neighbors Kelso of Brooklyn have done limited draft releases of some incredible sours in the past, though they're very hard to find, and I haven't seen any in a while.

Picking out breweries doing sour beer as an indicator of larger trends is slightly arbitrary, and again, I don't want to make it sound like I think wild ales are the only way left to innovate in beer. Even if this is largely just an article about the lack of a certain kind of beer in the New York market, I think maybe it says a bit more than that. If you work at a brewery, you're probably yelling at the screen at me: "Of course none of these small start-up breweries are doing sours, you diptube, they're the most expensive, unreliable, and time-consuming type of beer to produce!" Yes, absolutely fair. And let's be reasonable, in another few years, when some of these breweries have gotten their footing, I suspect we'll have another dozen or so beers to add to this list. You've got half a dozen options and then some pending maybes and beyond that, a lot of pale ales and ambers and flavored stouts and fruit beers with wheat. New York has the resources, the farms, the scenery; it deserves to have the ingenuity too. Right now, I can go to Bacchus or Peekskill and enjoy some world-class, truly creative beer while appreciating the gorgeous surroundings. As we try to change our beer scene from the farm on up, I want to see that sense of terroir and fermentive curiosity expand across the state, and see local flavor come to mean more than just Cascade hops from a vine in the backyard. Are farm brewers really embracing 'local' if they're putting out the same six beers as basically every suburban brewpub in the country?

The notion of the modern farm brewery is a fascinating and exciting vision, to me. I can't believe it's a coincidence that some of the most lauded and sought-out breweries in the world right now have close ties to the farmhouse model. And I can't wait to see it explored further, in New York, and elsewhere. Seeing the local harvest reflected in the ingredients and structure of a beer is awesome. Seeing it reflected in the weird and wild microbial world from which those crops spring — at least some of the time, in some beers — is even better.