Want to know a secret?  In between all of the work that goes into keeping our farm brewery going, we have a lot of fun out here.    The brewery itself may be only 2,400 square feet, but it sits on and is a key function of a 48 acre working farm.  With only three full time people working each operation, most of whom live on site there exists an inevitable gravitation toward work.  If we did not love what we were doing, there would be no way to justify all of the work that goes into it.

From the moment you wake up at 530 in the morning and take a walk through the hop yard with a cup of coffee before making the distribution routes for the day to the evening when you do the same with a beer, you quickly start to notice hop bines that need pruning, rows that need irrigation, and many more tasks that almost immediately transition your “time off” for relaxation back into work mode.  The moment you step into the brewery, days quickly turn into long nights, mashing in early and cleaning the tanks late, ending just in time to repeat the following day.  Maybe it’s the long hours, lack of sleep, or copious amounts of coffee that keep us joking with each other as we work and pass time as if we’re in ludicrous speed, or maybe it’s that we all come to the table with an absolute passion for what we do and the ridiculousness of it; either way there’s a lot of character behind the scenes that we don’t necessarily get to share with our consumers (no tasting room and all…) on a regular basis.

There’s a tremendous amount of thought, planning, and intent put into what we produce on our farm brewery; from the crop and pasture grazing rotations down to the addition of specific yeast and bacteria cultures to introduce into particular barrel aged beers.  So far, we have produced three beers which we have wanted to act as the core of our brand – Field Beer, a tart saison brewed with 100% CT grown malted barley; Waymaker, a 100% brett fermented IPA; and Farmer’s Table, a dry hopped table beer (low alcohol farmhouse ale).  Soon our barrel cellar will start to be emptied and there will be 100% CT grown grapefruit sours and other sour and funky beers coming out.  Where are we going with all of this you might ask?

Well, we recently, thanks to a good friend and neighbor Mike added two 10-bbl fermenters and a second brite tank to our brewery which is going to allow us to start sharing the lighter side of our personality and brewery with you.  Did I mention it’s going to be hoppier also?  We love really hoppy beers as much as we do our farmhouse and mixed fermentation ales.  And now we finally have a tank dedicated to making them!

We like our IPAs to be full of flavor, and as refreshing as our farmhouse ales.  Juicy.  Hoppy.  Not bitter.  And this is how we are going to make them.  Since we do not have big enough hop contracts (yet….) to make pretty much any IPA year round, for now there will be a lot of rotation in what we release.  Which means we need to find names for a whole lot of beers.  And this is where we start to have some fun.  We won’t be making puns about hoppiness, playing off individual hop names, or giving false pretense to a back story about why we chose the hops for each brand.  We choose them because they create delicious flavors and are what is available to us (so farmhouse of us).  SO……

In just a few weeks when you go to your favorite local bar and your bartender asks, “what’ll it be?” prepare yourself for some hoppy goodness from our farm and say, “let me get an Awkward Hug.”