You have a true farm brewery, on an organic farm. What’s unusual about your brewery?
B: I thought about putting together a diagram: it would start with us growing the hops—it’s less than 30 feet away from the brewery. So we bring the hops into the brewery, we use them, then we put then back outside as a mulch. There’s no motor turned on, it’s all by hand truck or bucket. People talk about going to gyms and things—no, just work. Don’t turn on a machine somewhere else to work out: just do the work out when you’re working.
This hundred-mile dinner you hosted: that seems to encompass a lot of what you believe in.
R: We are certified organic, the farm is certified organic, and what we’re trying to do is integrate the brewery and the farm together. What we tried to do with the banquet was to show people what seasonal eating is all about and to get them excited about what is available in their own backyard—and, in our case, it is literally what is in our own backyard.
We took the hundred-mile diet and—even though we poked a little bit of fun at it—we wanted to honor the way that farmers eat all the time. And bring people back in touch with what is available right there. This is what we eat—we really do grow our own food. For the dinner, we brought in a lovely chef and did classic French cuisine with all local ingredients, and every course was paired with a special cask-conditioned beer we did just for the event.
And mead as well, from the bees that are pollinating the trees for fruit we’re using in the beer…it goes on and on.
B: The guy who manages the hives, he loves our stout, so we have a trading partner there. He does the service of having the bees on our farm—we don’t think of it the other way around—we’re privileged to have the bees on our farm. So the bees do the work, he prepares the honey, we trade the for the honey, and he gets the beer off us.
This is something that worked before everybody became strangers, that’s how we dealt with each other. We want to build this community on a large scale and have people interacting properly with each other, not just passing promissory notes back and forth.
Beer is a means to an end for you, isn’t it?
B: Yes, and it’s a currency, too.
R: It’s also a way to get some cash income on a farm, which is a good thing—especially for a small, diversified organic farm. And it’s a way to make use of what we’re growing on the farm in a slightly different way—I mean, there’s only so much jam you can eat, but you can put some of that fruit into beer, too, and it’s much more exciting!
It has also become an educational tool for us. We can explain to people what it means to be an organic and why organic agriculture and the offshoot, organic processing, can be better for the planet and for individuals.
It gives us a platform. The name of the brewery is actually a platform: “crannóg” is the Irish term for a little house on stilts, and it gives us a chance to talk about the wise use of agricultural land, because in Scotland and Ireland they built these houses off shore in areas where they didn’t have a lot of land that wasn’t solid rock or bog, that you can actually grow crops on. That land is very precious—so you don’t go putting your houses and your golf courses on it, OK?
B: And if you build these houses off shore, you gradually create a midden underneath, so you’re slowly creating more agricultural land underneath you as well. So you’re actually expanding the land base.
Brewery getting cash…When we first started out, the idea was, how can we be on a property and work all year round on it? Because a lot of farmers have to get other jobs to prop up what they’re doing, right?
So, the idea was, we lessen our footprint by not commuting anywhere, and processing something that takes away from the farm. We’re really into supporting local—and how local can get but by supporting your own infrastructure by working all year round there.
People are always asking “How can you do so much stuff?” Well, we don’t go anywhere! I can see what’s happening, I can make sure we take proper care of where we are.
