The Colorado Malting Company added a 5-barrel brewhouse to its 300-acre family farm, making The Colorado Farm Brewery the first venture of its kind in the state.
While most Asian cultures make alcohol from rice, the Bhutanese farmhouse ales Sin Chang and Bang Chang start with 100 percent raw wheat. Reserved for religious and special occasions, these Wheatwines are a part of life for many.
Author Peter Kopp traces the hop’s history from its oldest ancestor, which grew in Asia, to the first hop arriving in America millions of years later, probably in a bottle of English ale.
In the PBS television series Brewed in NY, Maya Contreras and co-host Matt Archambault travel to the breweries, farms, and festivals that make up the state’s flourishing beer industry.
Known for its eclectic dining, music, and arts scene, Athens, Ga., gained its third brewery in May 2015 when Brian Roth opened The Southern Brewing Company to brew beer that “tastes like Athens.”
Teo Musso, one of the four original pioneers of Italy’s craft brewing movement, plans to debut Baladin Open Garden, a 786,000-square-foot beer park in the country’s Piedmont region, in June 2017.
Trading sprawling fields for rooftop gardens, urban farm breweries from Los Angeles to Chicago and New York bring a new kind of authenticity to farmhouse-style beers.
In states with farm brewery licenses, adding a brewery gives farmers the ability to use their crops in a product that they can sell directly to consumers, thus creating a new revenue stream, bringing tourism to the farm and forging a sense of community.
Hydroponic growing techniques have existed since the early 17th century. These methods have already changed the way vegetables can be grown across the world, but why hasn’t anyone tried to grow hops this way?
New York State’s introduction of the Farm Brewery License in 2013, paired with Governor Andrew Cuomo’s administration’s pro-brewery stance, has encouraged small farm breweries to open in the Hudson Valley.
Bale Breaker Brewing is the creation of siblings Meghann Quinn, Patrick Smith and Kevin Smith, whose family started growing hops in Washington’s Yakima Valley back in 1932. They founded Bale Breaker in 2013, with help from Kevin Quinn, Meghann’s husband.
If craft production is going to double in the next few years—per the Brewers Association’s goal of a 20 percent sales share by 2020—farmers will need to plant and harvest about another 18,000 acres of hops just to meet demand from craft brewers.
Not long ago, a Pale Ale brewed with Colorado-grown Centennial hops would have raised eyebrows. But that’s exactly what the state’s brewers guild made for the 2014 Craft Brewer’s Conference in Denver.
After public outcry from brewers and farmers, the Food and Drug Administration has promised to reword proposed regulations around using spent brewing grain as animal feed. The original proposal would have required brewers to dry, analyze and package the spent grain.
The world produced over 134 million metric-tons of barley between 2011 and 2012. But up to 95 percent of the world’s barley is susceptible to a variety of a fungal disease called stem rust that was discovered in Uganda in 1999. Dubbed Ug99, it has spread across East Africa and up into the Middle East.
In 2010, an Italian law reclassified beer as an agricultural product. Now, any brewery that makes its beer using 51 percent of brewery-grown raw materials can be classified as an agricultural brewery.
Located in North Hampton, N.H., Throwback strives to source as many of its ingredients from local farms as possible. That includes using locally grown hops, malt and adjuncts.
AB-InBev and MillerCoors want a piece of the apple cider pie; CAMRA Vancouver FUSS-ing over standardized pours; Belgium celebrates Trappist breweries; Oglala Sioux tribe suing brewers, wholesalers, retailers; and Virginia, Mississippi attempting to pass brew-friendly laws.
Genesee beer sign illuminates community once more; Funkwerks brew stirs ire of indigenous New Zealanders; Massachusetts ABCC withdraws troublesome farmer-brewer decision; and lager’s missing link discovered in Patagonia.
Before New England’s Valley Malt existed, a farmhouse brewery could never truly be a farmhouse brewery, and a harvest beer could never truly be a harvest beer.
