What Is Land Beer?
AtWheatland Spring Farm + Brewery's first annual Land Beer Fest in June, the festivities looked a little different than your traditional beer event. Instead of a convivial crowd jostling over tables of small tastings, owners Bonnie and John Branding designed their event to give visitors a peek behind the wheat sheaves.
邦妮说：“我们想将人们带入我们的领域，以在他们品尝的啤酒与周围生长的东西之间建立联系。”他们称之为“发酵耕种”的节，驻扎在其30英亩农场的专家弗吉尼亚州劳登县, about 50 miles northwest of Washington, DC. Festival-goers stopped at each to learn about the farmer, maltsters, and brewer behind each beer.
They're making land beer, which means they're brewing beer using ingredients they grow, harvest, and cultivate on the farm. The Branding's don't know of any operation like theirs in the country. Grains like wheat and barley, herbs, fruit, vegetables like yarrow andcucumber, and蜜糖从谷物田里的两个蜜蜂殖民地开始，都可以进入啤酒，例如Hold to Summer，Cucumber Gose和Corn Crib Farmhouse Lager。
People often think of land beer as a style of beer, but according to the Brandings, it encompasses more of an approach, "tapping into that ethos of marrying farming and brewing," says John. Wheatland Spring is an estate brewery, akin to an estate winery, where they grow the grapes, ferment, condition, bottle, and serve on site.
约翰说：“我们生产的一些啤酒是在啤酒屋一千英尺范围内由成分制成的100％。”其余的是使用在弗吉尼亚州或其农业种植地区的其他小农场上种植的工艺麦芽制造的。
邦妮（Bonnie）和约翰（John）三年前开始在土地上耕种后，于2019年6月开设了惠特兰（Wheatland）春天。在搬到北弗吉尼亚州之前，这对夫妇居住在德国，在那里他们受到该国的农场啤酒厂的启发，这些农场啤酒厂使该地区的啤酒或啤酒。
邦妮说：“开车去了巴伐利亚北部的一家啤酒厂，能够将其停在啤酒厂的下一份啤酒旁边的食材旁边，这是我在美国不熟悉的东西。”“我从未见过从土地上涌出的产品水平，并在茶花室里送达，这是农场啤酒厂与周围农业具有的身份。”
When they made the decision to move forward with their dream of running an estate brewery, the couple started researching farms, digging into elements like water quality and soil health. They looked at some 70 swaths of farmland for sale, and Wheatland Spring, which started as a working farm around 1832, had the magic mix of top notch topsoil quality, and the pure water from hundreds of feet below the fields that needs no manipulation. The cycling teams that show up on weekends to fill their water bottles from Wheatland's spigot tell them they have exceptional water.
These elements all add up to stellar beers—made in the farm's hundred-year-old corn crib—that show off the character of the land in a moment in time. The Harvest 2020, for example, is a farmhouse ale conditioned in oak wine barrels over a winter and spring. It's made with estate honey, plus wild-captured yeast.
To really capture the taste and character of the farm, they captured their own yeast. The team put a sugar source (in this case, wort) out in the fields, then brought the samples to a nearby lab to isolate the yeasts. Over the next year, they made small batches of beer to test the strains. "Most of them were not very good," says John. But they found three that resonated, and expressed different lanes of character from the farm. "They each reflect a different farmhouse ale strain that we use regularly and in all our beers."
为什么要付出所有麻烦（从字面意义上讲，毕竟这是耕种）？这不仅仅是试图制作当地啤酒，或者严格使用它们生长的成分。通过完全控制土壤，选择，加工（沿途的每一步都有什么用处）可以生长和收获最好的食材，并将其转变为想要喝的啤酒。
"It's not novelty of proximity for us," says John. "We want it to be the highest quality beer we can. But by its very nature, it's going to reflect where it's from, because the ingredients are so unique and special."
The inconsistencies are part of what makes the beer great. American beer has long taken its cues from macro-breweries, where consistency is king. With so many variables on the farm—weather, crops, even the honey flavor changes as the crops rotate— it means the beers can be unpredictable.
"Part of what we're trying to convey to folks," notes John, "is that variation in our natural agricultural products is not only okay, but it's a really good thing."