Tilted Barn: A Sense of Place
By Mark Ewald, aka Shep
Many of you know that Shep speaks about 'a sense of place' quite bit when it comes to beers. It’s kinda like terroir in wine. Every beverage has a sense of place but some really have it in a way that others just can’t quite get. In Shep’s travels in his search of the best beers made on the planet, the best of the best are the ones that provide a sense of where they were made. As the number of breweries grow, this sense of place will start to separate the crowd. The ones who can create a sense of place in their beers will be the ones that ultimately stand out.
Many of the world’s greatest beers are brewed on farms in Germany, Belgium, England and the US, and what better way to create a sense of place than to have a beer brewed on a farm. After all, beer is really an agricultural product, so why not make it on a farm?! These farm brewers are giving us a peak into their special place, especially the ones that actually brew with ingredients grown right there on the property.
This is why a bunch of successful brewers have recently purchased their own farms. They want to produce and control more of their ingredients and give their beer unique flavors and aromas. Every farm has their own water source, their own environment, their own crops, and native wild yeasts that, when combined with the love, time and dedication that it takes to brew good beer, creates a truly unique flavor that’s specific to that land. It creates that sense of place.
The usual story is that a successful brewery goes and buys a farm for its own purposes, but with Tilted Barn, owners Matt and Kara Richardson were farmers first. They brought a brewery to their farm! Their family had a farm in Exeter, RI, and after they finished college, ( in VT I may add) they moved back to RI and started helping on the farm. Their green thumbs and love of the land led them to start growing hops. If you don’t know, growing hops on a small scale for commercial scale is pretty difficult, to say the least. They put in the infrastructure and planted hops anyway. Eventually, they decided that a brewery would be a more viable business and the bonus was that they had homegrown hops to use.
Matt and Kara wanted to share their farm, their place, with others through beer. Their 2-bbl system combined with the crazy restrictive RI laws made running a successful brewery a difficult proposition, but in true hard-working farmer fashion, they put their heads down and organically grew their brand to be one of the most sought after beers in New England. Obstacle here, permit there, regulations galore. They plowed ahead and they grew from that humble 2-bbl system to, just this year, commissioning a new 30-bbl system at a brand new, (hopefully not too tilted) post and beam barn! (The name Tilted Barn came about because their original barn brewery didn’t have one thing level or plumb in the whole place! Kinda like VT!!!) Even with their success, Matt and Kara are still very hands on at the brewery, all the while still doing their farming tasks, like keeping the 1/2 dirt road plowed in winter so people can visit and get a glimpse into their place.
As Matt and Kara have grown their very successful business, the crowds to their place have also grown. People want a glimpse into their place. They have to manage these crowds, like many successful brewers do, and request that people don’t show up more than an hour before they open. They take Sunday off and put a rope across the drive so they can have their place to themselves and keep their sacred family time with their four children. One thing that hasn’t changed with their success is that Matt and Kara are still farmers. They are hard-working, super kind, family-oriented and just fine humble hands-in-the-dirt humans that aren’t looking for the limelight. They just want to produce an honest agricultural product which, I think is pretty special.
Matt and Kara love VT as they went to school here. They are over the moon to have their beer for sale in the Green Mountains. They are over the moon that Vermonters are clamoring for their beer. So without further adieu, let’s all welcome Tilted Barn to VT! If ya got a minute, how about giving Matt and Kara a shoutout and let them know how we appreciate them sharing their place with all of us even in VT!