The Brewers of Nye Hill Farm

From this country’s very beginning, brewing was commonplace on farms. From the incomparable Oxford Companion to Beer: “Like many gentlemen farmers of his day, Thomas Jefferson’s estate included a brewery.” Radical Brewing, the highly regarded and entertaining source on the history and craft of beer, includes Jefferson’s recipe for “Plug Nickel”, Jefferson’s version of pale ale, and another for George Washington’s “Small Beer” (a recipe Radical Brewing, by the way, calls “crummy”).

It was only the Industrial Revolution and improvements in the transportation of goods that spelled the demise of hand crafted, small batch beers brewed locally on farms, much as they spelled the demise of many farms themselves. This is all a long way around the barn to suggest that brewing beer was an integral part of agriculture as this country once knew it, as opposed to the agribusiness we see today.

Here, we’ve embarked to follow in the footsteps of the founding farmers. As the on-site brewers, the Brewers of Nye Hill Farm, we strive to source local and American ingredients and, of course, our own farm produce. We brew in single barrel batches in our barn-based brewery that overlooks our orchard, pastures and fields, and we’ve aptly named our flagship series of Pale Ales, “Nye P.A.”