So I know that Grassroots Brewing is essentially Shaun Hill from Hill Farmstead. I know he uses this name a lot when he does colabs. But I can't really find any info on it. Why does he use another name sometimes?
Did a search on here and found this... has some good info in it http://www.beeradvocate.com/community/threads/grassroots-hill-farmstead-relationship.198198/
Why do you use another name online??? Seriously, this is the label for all of Shaun's collaboration beers that aren't brewed at HF... legalese involved, plus the desire to protect the 'pure' brand.
That's not quite correct since there are plenty of Grassroots beers that are not collabs and are brewed at Hill Farmstead by Shaun.
Ive never bothered to look into this, but I've heard it's a distribution thing. Once you hook in w/ a distributor they own the distribution rights of your brand. You see Grassroots outside of HF, which means whoever he distributes through only has rights to distribute the Grassroots brand, not "Hill Farmstead".
Grassroots is also Shaun's distribution branch of his business so he can legally be both 1st & 2nd tier...https://sites.google.com/a/hillfarmstead.com/grassroots-distribution/ I know that Grassroots was Hill Farmstead's predecessor. I think it was the name of the brewery he was planning before he went over to Denmark...someone can correct me here if I'm wrong.
Collaboration with other brewers go under the Grassroots label: Convivial w/ Dan Suarez; Brother Soigné w/ Luc LaFontaine; Bliss of Absence w/ Anders Kissmeyer. Though not sure how Jackie O and Crooked Stave collabs ended up with HF labels...
I still think it's more complicated than that. There are labels like La Vermontoise and Lemon Cello which are brewed elsewhere but have the Hill Farmstead logo. And vice versa Le Sarrasin and Daybreak which are brewed in Greensboro and have the Hill Farmstead logo but also bare the collab breweries' logos, albeit with La Sarrasin having a drastically different design than normal Hill Farmstead labels.
I posted in that linked thread about the history of the brand from what I could gather. As for which beers go where, after looking at it and the inconsistencies I think it has to do with what "series" a beer is in. Most collabs go under Grassroots, unless Shaun wants the beer to fit into a HF series (or possible he just thinks it's going to be really good and worthy of HF name, like Le Sarrasin). Might also have to do with who actually formulates the recipe more than where it is brewed.
It's definitely more art than science, and I think you have whatever "formula" there is pretty well down. I'd add that if a beer is going to have a big Hill Farmstead label on the front, it's almost certainly going to be brewed there. HF-tagged collabs brewed (Lemon Cello, etc.) elsewhere have tended to play down the association. I'd mildly disagree about "worthy of HF name": Grassroots Legitimacy is, IMHO, one of the best IPAs to come out of Greensboro.
Agree with the more art than science. Generally it is certainly more of a collaboration or gypsy beer thing. There has been some odd use of the hill farmstead name recently though on grassroots beer to make it more clear. Best instance of this is to compare batch one and two of arctic saison. One in the text alludes to a vt farmstead brewery. Two calls out hill farmstead explicitly. I think some of this is just for sales purposes. When batch one was released in some markets it was clear that the beer was not bought up as quickly as it might have been if it was explicitly at hill farmstead product. When that was made more explicit things changed a little, at least in the sd market. That said, what qualifies as grassroots is often something that really is just able to be distributed outside vt. This means more often than not that enough was produced to merit a wider distribution.
