Methods
Terroir exists in beer (or wine, or any product of the earth) to the extent that it is allowed to express itself. It is our first principle to make way for nature in the production of our beer.
Since 2017, our wort has been brewed with exclusively local grain, typically comprising a grist of raw wheat and floor-malted barley. In those early brewing seasons, we had no brewhouse of our own and relied instead on brewing friends willing to lend a kettle and a hand and too many hours of a day to produce our arduous wort bound first for our mobile coolship and then our blendery’s barrel stacks. As of our 2021 move from New Jersey to Pennsylvania, we now brew for ourselves on our rudimentary farmhouse brewing equipment with a direct-fired kettle, or, when that fails us, an outdoor wood-fired makeshift kettle.
Out of the kettle the boiling wort is sent straight to the coolship, now rehomed into a wire-walled corncrib located at the intersection of our three vineyard blocks. Here, the hidden life present in all air has its opportunity to descend on the rippling, exposed bed of wort as it cools in the night. This is the crucial evental site when and where spontaneous inoculation occurs. This gravid wort is then transferred to cleaned wooden barrels at our blendery, where fermentation will begin of its own accord: naturally, spontaneously.
Inside the barrel: the chaos of survival, with every microorganism struggling to maximally reproduce and strive for resources in a constantly shifting and frequently inhospitable environment. This full array of microbial activity over a long period of time is what lends these fully spontaneously fermented beers their distinct complexities and expressions of place.
When a barrel of this beer has entered into being (has character, direction, purpose) we submit it to blending with other barrels or to fruiting with local fruit, with complementarity in mind in either instance. 100% of our fruit now comes from Pennsylvania or a neighboring state, so that we can assure its ripeness, its growing conditions, and, frequently, know the farmers and work with them toward a more sustainable partnership. Fruit additions are prepared by us from real, whole fruit to be exclusively spontaneously refermented. No purées, no flavorings, no extracts, no preservatives, no fruit picked at underripeness to withstand the cross-country truck ride to arrive at a grocery store unblemished and devoid of flavor.
Increasingly, we are able to make use of our 6 acre home plot for fruit & herb additions that we grow ourselves organically. Grapes, apples, pears, plums, elderflower/elderberries, aronia, raspberries, lavender, lemon balm, chamomile, coriander, spruce tips, rhubarb—all contribute their own characteristics given from the soil, air, and microbes thereof, and the beer benefits from these deep influences.
When we opt to referment our beers for carbonation in the bottle, can, or keg, we do so naturally—whether by addition of local honey, wort reduction, fruit juice or allowing for an earlier fermentation to finish in the package—without the use of force carbonation or the addition of yeast cultures. We do not add and have never added yeast or other bacterial cultures to any of our beers at any point in their production.
These are beers with no chemical corrections or additions, no filtration, no pasteurization, no backsweetening, resistant to the sirens’ songs of capitalism and industrialization that sweetly sing: “do it cheaper and faster / the idiot masses can’t tell the difference anyway”.
They are beers made of our environs’ self-expressions—chaos framed by us once nature over time has rendered it beautiful—and presented to you to enjoy.