Every December Phil Runco publishes Beer in Review, in which he asks some of the local brewers and brewery owners their thoughts on the year that was and their hopes for what will be. A response from Bonnie and John Branding, co-founders, co-owners, and in John’s case, brewer, of Wheatland Spring Farm + Brewery, raised some eyebrows. In the 2023 Beer in Review they wrote:
“Moving beyond style guidelines written for another time and place continues its positive momentum. The best is yet to come for truly local beer, wherever your local is. We’re seeing progress experimenting with ingredients from here and methods responsive to them. Local beers will be different than predecessors from afar – even if they share a similar style name – and that’s something to celebrate.“
We invited the Brandings to elaborate, asking what role does style—and really, what role should style—play in their beers? What have they noticed about how their beers are being received?
“We’d turn your question around — we see an increase in openness to exploring new types of beer and new interpretations of existing styles with our intention, ingredients, and methods. Style guidelines are a double-edged sword. They can help orient people to particular flavor profiles they’ve liked in the past. On the other hand, when style guidelines are used as a crutch for how a style ‘must’ be, they can quickly turn into handcuffs that stymie progress. This is a two way conversation between customers and breweries. A lot of this experience comes from interactions with our customers asking about our Estate beer: Piedmont Ale or Piedmont Lager. More broadly, it extends to using non-traditional local grains for lagers, too. This is something we’ve also seen in other breweries,” John replied.
The Brandings cite Beute, a Fox Farm and Schilling collaboration lager made with triticale from Fox Farm and additional malts–and hops–from Vermont, as one such example.
“All of our Estate beer is 100% made with grains we grow next to the brewhouse, which are custom malted in small batch to specs we dial in with our maltster. Right off the bat, this malt doesn’t exist elsewhere. Our Piedmont Ales are fermented with yeast native to our farm that we wild-capture. Between the water we draw from a natural source, our custom-malted grain that we regeneratively grow here, and the native yeast used to ferment the beer, it’s unique and existing style guidelines more often hinder instead of help. Early on, we found that when an existing style was used to describe one of our Estate beers, we’d sometimes hear: ‘this is supposed to taste like this or that.’ It was funny to hear because how would a style guideline written for a beer first produced hundreds of years ago in a place thousands of miles away know what this beer from our time and our place is supposed to taste like? But we get it — many people need some kind of bridge to engage with a beer. That’s why we use Piedmont, our growing region, as a descriptor. It’s similar to how vineyards or cideries might use a region to describe the wine or cider. We’ve found this prompts questions from people and invites a conversation about our Estate beer in particular, and more generally about local beer made from local ingredients. It will taste different than macro beer from another country… and that’s something to celebrate.”
If that response reminds you of the concept of terroir in wine, well, you might be onto something. “Different beers at Wheatland Spring taste of the 30 acres the farm sits on in different ways. They are all brewed with the same intention, to connect the land and the beer,” wrote author Stan Hieronymus last year. Ninety-nine percent of wine might lack terroir, a sense of place expressed in the flavors of what was made and the methods in which it was made, and that’s probably true for 99.999 percent of beer. We’re lucky to have Wheatland Spring close to us. Terroir in beer is but a 90 minute drive for much of our readership.
Wheatland cans are available in DC proper at Magruder’s and Odd Provisions, as well as Shelter, and shipping is always available to Virginia and the District.
Wheatland’s seasonal farmers’ market at the brewery picks back up on April 27, and their Land Beer Fest returns on Saturday, June 8. With the weather turning nicer, we highly recommend a visit.
