Some of us remember when the desire for a beer more exotic than a Lowenbrau dark drove people to brew their own ales.
From those homebrewed 5-gallon batches of porters and bitters in the ’70s and ’80s arose today’s incredibly diverse and tasty craft brewing industry, where everything interesting in beer-making is happening these days. Craft brewing has spread across the landscape in a return to pre-Prohibition yesteryear when small breweries served neighborhoods like convenience stores do today.
Even so, it still seems incredible to us that Franklin County, the state’s most rural county, has become home to eight breweries, not to mention at least five makers of hard cider, mead and other fermented beverages. They’ve become a solid part of the region’s economy and locavore landscape.
Some of the energy behind this trend no doubt is the growing interest in fresh, tasty beers of many styles. It is said that the best beer is fresh beer. In that respect, interest in locally fermented beverages has expanded with our growing taste for all things local, but especially in the things we produce and eat. Recent years have seen more and more small specialized farms and community supported agriculture. The county, and the Pioneer Valley generally, have become home to many latter day hippies and millenials who appreciate that home grown food is better for our local economy and our individual health. And our microbrews, ciders and meads fit right in, alongside our local maple syrup and honey, which in some instances have become ingredients for the local brews.
In recent years we have reported on the local cultivation of hops and barley — the two fundamental ingredients of beer, so that places like the People’s Pint in Greenfield can serve a beer not just brewed locally but sourced locally — for the pure at heart.
So we suppose it was inevitable that Franklin County should gather all these fermenters together so we can meet them and sample their wares in one place: Franklin County On Tap, the first Franklin County fermenter’s festival, which will be held at Berkshire East in Charlemont on July 16. (The Recorder is a co-sponsor of the event.)
The fermenters, with their own back stories, will be coming from all corners of the county. Among them will be Jay Sullivan and Sean Nolan who started Honest Weight Artisan Beer in Orange “because we love beer;” Bill “Lefty” Goldfarb and his wife, Melissa, who started “Lefty’s” in Bernardston and moved to Greenfield as business grew; Justin Korby, the former stonemason who uses 90 percent local ingredients in his nano-brewery in the hills of Colrain and sells brew shares to friends and neighbors; Alden Booth’s People’s Pint in Greenfield, the original county brewpub; Gary Bogoff’s Berkshire Brewing Co. of Deerfield, the first brewery; Lawrence George’s Brick and Feather in Turners Falls; Element Brewing of Dan Kramer and Ben Anhalt who export to Europe from Millers Falls; the newest brewers, Rich and Geneva Pederson of Hitchcock Brewing of Whately; and the west county cideries represented by Peter Mitchell of Headwater Cider in Hawley, the Maloneys of West County Cider of Colrain, the Wheelers of Wheel-View Farm in Shelburne and Jennifer Williams and Steve Gougeon of Bear Swamp Cidery of Ashfield.
And because this is Franklin County, there will also be mead and ginger beer and fermented tea, drinks from the Artisan Beverage Cooperative.
Most of these folks promise to bring special brews to the first Franklin County On Tap fermenters festival where you can meet your neighborhood brewers and sample their wares.
Think of it as a farmers market for beer, cider and mead.
In the meantime, you can read about all their personal stories in a special supplement in Thursday’s Recorder. By the time you meet them on July 16, they may feel like old friends, or at least like a familiar neighborhood brewer, another aspect of our locavore landscape.