Crossing the Delaware

We started searching for a farm home for The Referend in 2015, with our sights set on the sourlands of Central NJ, and after a year and a half of striking out, we found ourselves a perfectly suitable blank canvas of a warehouse in Pennington. But we kicked the dream of planting real roots down the line into the present day. We’re here now.

Throughout 2021, we’ll be gradually moving The Referend’s operations from our Pennington, NJ home of six years to our new farm in Kutztown, PA. We’re excited and delighted and can’t wait to show you around.

Our coolship, after five full seasons of mobile service, will take up residence in an old corn crib among the vines, with the ambient vineyard microflora blowing through the wire walls to inoculate our house-brewed wort.

The coolship will settle in among the vines

From there, the wort will be racked to barrels in the 1850s-built stone barn cellar, nestled into a hillside to more naturally maintain beneficial cellar temperatures and humidity. Under these optimal conditions, the wort will spontaneously ferment and age the usual eons. In addition to the grapes, apples, and pears already deep-rooted into this earth, we’ll be planting our own herbs, elderflower, rhubarb, raspberries, and apricot & sour cherry trees, all grown without pesticides and harvested for use in our beer, mere minutes after picking.

Your seat someday, with a glass in your hand above the vines

We’ll serve our naturally fermented beer in our three-season barn venue, much as we’ve operated our NJ tasting room and with considerable improvements:

We make strange/advanced beers designed, like art, to reconfigure one’s brain, one’s sense of the boundaries of the possible. We are the first to admit that one cannot live on such high-concept inputs alone. One needs pilsner and IPA and cask mild at times. Still, the products of spontaneity are all we care to make. In Pennsylvania, this is no problem—we may serve our colleagues’ barleywines and brown ales alongside our own Berliner Weisse and impressions of saison. (Our saison, incidentally, will now regularly include estate buckwheat grown between the vineyard rows.)

We’ll keep spinning vinyl as a rule, with live performances on the barn stage the exception. Pre-COVID, the barn was a very popular live music venue, and post-COVID we hope we can rebuild some of those peopled sonic experiences we’ve all been missing out on so long. A return, for example, to our Lorenzian deconstructed holiday jazz, during which we’ll ladle up local-spirit-spiked Glück (our mulled cherry beer) for the first time, with we behind the bar positively glowing from our newfound freedoms, however simple they seem.

In the winter, when not warmed by jazz and Glück in the drafty barn, we’ll retreat to the relative warmth of the cellar bar below, with a view onto the barrel cellar.

The Lawn Times of the future will look a little different.

Vines the age of our cellarman/brewer, Tom.

Kind of a lot of vines for a brewery? Well, yes. In a good year, these harvests will well outpace what we can use in our beer. Melissa & I are starting a small winery project on the premises, with these grapes and (so goes the plan) these grapes alone. We’re calling it Therein Wine, and it’s as absurd and ambitious as The Referend, following a damn-near identical ethos of pursuing natural methods as far as one can by giving over the rein to nature as much as one can. These wines, when they eventually become available, will likely be sold through a bottle membership program, with a cellar list available in The Referend’s tasting barn.

We are brimming with gratitude for the years given us in New Jersey, the support of our local customers, friends and fellow-breweries. Nothing about this is easy, but everything about this move is designed to sustain and advance our principled commitments into the near and distant future.

In the coming months, we’ll be forming a bottle membership program with priority given to our existing customers in appreciation of joining us on this wildest of journeys from the start.

Keep following along with our mailing list or social media for more concrete updates on timing, but if all goes according to plan we’ll continue our NJ Lawn Times and curbside pickups through the year, with operations picking up in Kutztown by early fall.

See you on the other side!