What's on Tap for 2024: Raising a Glass at 3 Catskills Breweries

Transcribed by Jerome Kazlauskas

Brett Barry  0:03  
Happy New Year and welcome to the first episode of our fifth season here at Kaatscast. To ring in the new year, we thought it would be fun to raise a glass with the owners of three breweries across the region and these breweries don't just call the Catskills home; the Catskills are brewed into every pint, whether that's by starting with Clear Mountain Spring Water at Sullivan County's Upward Brewing, incorporating flavorful foraged ingredients at Greene County's West Kill Brewing, with a new satellite tasting room in Ulster County or honoring history of place at Delaware County's Union Grove Distillery, where Calico Outlaw Brewing is also setting up shop. Three breweries, four counties, all Catskills. Grab a glass and let's toast the new year together!

Dana Ball  0:53  
So do you hear me through your mic ... your headphones?

Brett Barry  0:56  
Yeah.

Dana Ball  0:56  
Oh, you do? Okay.

Brett Barry  0:57  
First stop, Upward Brewing in Livingston Manor, New York, where co-owner, Dana Ball, met me outside with two empty glasses.

Dana Ball  1:08  
The biggest piece of beer is water, so we found this water source because it used to supply the whole town with water and it was just sitting here the property was ... was available and we bought this in 2017 and here's the water that's coming out of the springhouse. As you can see, it's super clear; flowing abundantly, coming right out of the mountain, squirts right out of this thing.

Brett Barry  1:38  
Cheers!

Dana Ball  1:39  
We tasted the water and we got it analyzed and we realized, okay, this would be a great spot to have a brewery, and ... and so we ... we went to work and we built the ... this ... this building ourselves, we designed it ourselves, and we wanted to have a taproom without tanks in it. We wanted to have a merchandise room without that being in the main room as well and we wanted to have a private manufacturing space, so we can brew any time of the day and not affect people around us, and ... and ... and then we happen to have 120 acres here, too, so people can go for a hike. We wanted to bring in leisure activity as well. People celebrating the outdoors than going inside and appreciating a nice beer and some food and I feel like that's like the whole full circle of what craft beer kind of how it started and where it should go, you know.

Brett Barry  2:29  
And this piece of the property here is called Beer Mountain?

Dana Ball  2:33  
Yeah.

Brett Barry  2:33  
... how that came about ...

Dana Ball  2:35  
Yeah.

Brett Barry  2:35  
A lot of people do here.

Dana Ball  2:36  
So when I was selling beer for Brooklyn Brewery in the East Village, there was a place called d.b.a. and it is still there. Ray Deter was the owner there. He was one of the first people that embrace craft beer and he spoke about the ... the legendary Beer Mountain where you ... he would climb this mountain and get this most sought after keg that nobody can get and you'd bring it back to the bar and everyone would celebrate by drinking this very rare keg of beer and he had passed away a couple years before we found this property and when I climbed to the top of this when we were looking at this property. I thought to myself, "Well, this is Beer Mountain and there you go."

Brett Barry  3:17  
So there are several breweries in this immediate area, what sets you apart?

Dana Ball  3:24  
I think the water does. I think the fact that owners actually brew the beer. They're here every day and I work on the food menu. We pour beer behind the bar and keeping the ... keeping the team lean. We always self-distribute and we're lucky to have people come here and experience the mountain ... the leisurely activity, so I think that's ... that's ... that's a lot right there that separates us from most folks, you know, so as you can see the kitchens here, it's a separate entity: the bar, the bar room, a beautiful view, and the design that we did in here was really ... because we looked out those windows and we saw that those colors were what we chose to be inside, so all those reds and greens and oranges and ... and we didn't want to screw this up in here. So here's the production space. Really, you're only as big as your cooler when it comes to breweries. So we have a hefty size cooler there that came from an old butchery in Cleveland and we put that together and hopefully we never grow out of that. But if you do, then you got to find a new facility to brew beer in and it gets all complicated after that and we make all our beer here in house and no contract brewing. It's just me and Dave and Seth is our assistant brewer that are in the brewhouse here and like maybe eight more employees after that and only three are full-time. We're brewing about once a week. We're nearly 1,200 barrels this year. That's forty barrels a week, and so if we want to take a peek in that cooler, we do a pallet and a half or two of cans in the rest are kegs. So as you can see, this is about half of what we normally have in here at this time; going into winter, things slow down all over the place. So fresh beer is our main concern. So we'll go to half brews and we'll go twenty barrels at a time to brewing. Another cool feature. Before we built the building, we trenched a PVC pipe for our draft lines that run under the building in the dirt. We run our kegs from this cooler to the bar and it's actually colder when it comes out on the other end than it is when it leaves, so there is some sort of geothermal cooling going on with us and here's my partner, Dave.

David Walton  5:42  
David Walton. I'm one of the ... one of the principals here at Upward Brewing. Dana and I get along really well and we met each other probably fifteen years ago. We lived kind of right near each other and we sort of met over music and ended up working together. You know, his skill set is different than mine, so it works out pretty well.

Brett Barry  6:03  
And you guys both brew?

David Walton  6:04  
Yeah, we do. Yeah, yeah, I know the engineering side of things and he knows the ingredient's side and we both have similar palates, so it works really well.

Dana Ball  6:14  
I think a perfect, perfect partnership is not somebody that bring the same skill set. It's somebody that one guy can do this and the other guy can't and this guy can do that and the other guy can and I think that's where we've succeeded and we certainly are no experts, so we accepted that big sign on the wall over there that says, "We want a World Beer Cup, which is super flattering." It really helps us sleep at night, you know.

Brett Barry  6:40  
That's no small feat, but I understand that there's a lot of competition on that.

Dana Ball  6:43  
Yeah, certainly. You're competing against the best brewers in the world and we only entered two beers as the first time we did it and ... and we won for one, which the category was "Contemporary American-Style Lager" and we know that we're on the right path.

Brett Barry  7:00  
And you can move forward with confidence.

Everyone  7:02  
Yeah.

David Walton  7:03  
So you guys are drinking water.

Brett Barry  7:05  
I thought, you know, this is not what I expected before.

Dana Ball  7:11  
The base of what we do 90% of a beer is water, so that's not a bad start.

Brett Barry  7:16  
I'm telling you about the other ingredients. Do they come from anywhere around here?

Dana Ball  7:20  
Yeah, so we're farm brewers as well. You can have a farm brewer's license as well as a microbrewery license and we have both and that means a certain amount of percentage of our ... of our ingredients every year have to meet a threshold and to hold this license.

David Walton  7:36  
You know, we try to use New York ingredients where we can, especially in hops.

Dana Ball  7:39  
We make a land beer, a summer camp land beer, which is all New York ingredients, I think. I don't know. There's only a few breweries that really concentrate on just using 100% New York grown ingredients. There's more of that today because it's important to support farmers and ... and people that malt the grain, but we're really proud of our summer camp land beer, and so that's one of our biggest beers that we sell here at least in the summer.

Brett Barry  8:07  
What is a land ... Lander's ... is that a category?

Dana Ball  8:09  
So it is kind of a catch-all. It means using local ingredients. It's like local beer: land beer and ... and that's also a lager. So it comes from, you know, our base camp lagers and one that won the World Beer Cup, so that's a facet of that base camp. So I think that ... that's a good indicative measure of what we're able to do here, which is exciting for us, you know.

Brett Barry  8:31  
At this point, it was finally time to trade my waterglass in for a series of beer glasses and we continued our conversation over at the taps.

Dana Ball  8:40  
Alright, let's start with the Base Camp LagerBier, right? We're the World Beer Cup winner! The nice thing about this recipe is Dave and I created it literally minutes before we brewed it. Some people spend a long time working on a recipe. Sometimes things don't need to be worked on forever and ...

Brett Barry  8:59  
That's the Base Camp LagerBier.

Dana Ball  9:00  
The Base Camp LagerBier.

Brett Barry  9:03  
So when are you open as a brewery and is food always available?

Dana Ball  9:07  
Yes, food is always available. Six days a week ... we're open.

David Walton  9:11  
We're only closed on Mondays.

Brett Barry  9:13  
That kind of sets you apart right there, too. So a few places are open.

Dana Ball  9:16  
Yeah and have food.

Brett Barry  9:17  
Regularity.

Dana Ball  9:17  
Yeah, you know, we want to ...

Well, that's what we would expect. We want ... you should have food with beer and should be open most days a week. We would love to be open seven days a week, but ... but we're not.

David Walton  9:20  
Think we should get more than one day off. But, you know, I'll take what I can get.

Dana Ball  9:33  
Are you drinking Breadwinner? Now, this was the first beer we made and worked on for a long time.

Brett Barry  9:42  
And you characterize it as having an orange gummy tangerine grapefruit?

Dana Ball  9:47  
That's right. Yeah, this tangerine citrusy ...

David Walton  9:53  
Sort of aromatic.

Dana Ball  9:54  
We call it ... "No Coast Pale Ale" and we do designate it as an IPA because it is pretty hoppy with the grain malt bill that we have there. It's a pretty light grain malt bill, but ... but refreshing.

David Walton  10:06  
Not bitter, but no ... but really flavorful.

Brett Barry  10:10  
And where does that flavor come from?

David Walton  10:12  
The hops, I think, yeah.

Brett Barry  10:14  
Can you rattle off the name of the hops ...

David Walton  10:17  
Oh, sure.

Brett Barry  10:17  
... or is that secret?

Dana Ball  10:18  
No, there's no secrets. Yeah, you know, that's the funny thing, too. People think these coveted recipes are so secret and they put them in a vault, you know, like it's mainly its process ... its dedication to repeat that process is what makes a good, good brewery as far as I'm concerned and we use El Dorado in this beer. That's like the main hop. Some Citra: the Citras and a lot of our beers. We like the way it plays with some of these hops, but the ... the orangy you're getting from is from the El Dorado. That's the big ... the big boy and that beer, and yeah, we're pretty proud of this beer.

Brett Barry  10:51  
So there's ten beers on today's list, which are the ones that are always available.

David Walton  10:55  
Breadwinner, the Hex Hazy, Opiate Sun IPA, Golden Ratio New Zealand Pale, Base Camp LagerBier: The World Cup Winner, Black Grass Pils-Noir, and the Ascension Pils-Noir. Those are ... those are always available. That's the core.

Dana Ball  11:15  
People are excited to see that we're not all over the place to, you know, no one wants to throw a dart to figure out which beer to drink and they also ... I feel pretty comfortable with knowing that they could also walk into a package store and see our six beers on the shelf and ... and pick one not maybe having tried it before, but they have confidence knowing that all the other beers they've had is tasted great, so why wouldn't this and I think that's a good mindset to take on when ... when you're creating a beer menu.

David Walton  11:42  
You know, we also think that consistency is kind of important. You know, if somebody feels like they have a Breadwinner and they want to have it again and they go back to the store and it doesn't taste the same, that's bad on us. You know, we want to ... we want to make sure that they have a pleasant experience every time you pick up one of our cans, you know.

Brett Barry  12:00  
How do you achieve that consistency?

David Walton  12:04  
Pay attention to what you're doing.

Dana Ball  12:06  
Well, do it yourself.

David Walton  12:07  
Yeah.

Dana Ball  12:07  
And also the passion to do this ... I think when it starts at the top, passion is not there for a lot of people. We're excited to brew when we brew and we're excited to clean toilets when we have to clean toilets.

Brett Barry  12:19  
Excited?

David Walton  12:19  
I'm not. No, not me. I'm not excited. It'll get done, but I'm not excited.

Brett Barry  12:27  
We concluded our tasting with OM: An Imperial Oatmeal Stout. Mmm, delicious! And I asked owner brewers, Dana and Dave, "What's on tap for 2024?"

Dana Ball  12:39  
We will. We have an escape pod. We're going to unveil. It's an Airbnb, so people can stay here on the property. It's a container home. It's totally outfitted. Modern outfitting. It's got a nice front deck. It's got a roof deck to it. Yeah.

David Walton  12:55  
Yeah.

Dana Ball  12:56  
We're excited about that. I think it'll give our customers an experience that they can go for hikes and they can then chill out and spend the night and so that's one thing that's gonna happen this year. Keep making good beer and hopefully another World Beer Cup.

Brian Mulder  13:11  
Heading north on Beaver Kill and Barkaboom and skirting the southeast edge of the Pepacton Reservoir will get you into Delaware County and the hamlet of Arkville, where Union Grove Distillery has been pouring craft spirits for the better part of seven years, and later this year, Calico Outlaw Brewing will add local beer to the mix. I stopped in for a chat with Union Grove's Brian Mulder and Calico Outlaw's John Fairbairn.

Brett Barry  13:22  
And Brian's just poured... what do we have in our glasses here?

Brian Mulder  13:46  
A little bit of the Dry Brook whiskey; rye whiskey.

Brett Barry  13:49  
Cheers!

Brian Mulder  13:50  
Cheers! 92 proof, 75% rye, 25% malted barley. Some of the grain was actually grown right here in Arkville. Good stuff.

Brett Barry  13:50  
That's good.

Brian Mulder  14:02  
Yeah.

Brett Barry  14:04  
So Brian, we talked a while back.

Brian Mulder  14:07  
Yeah.

Brett Barry  14:07  
Give us a rundown with you would have of this place.

John Fairbairn  14:11  
So we've been open seven years this yet. This February 10th will be open seven years. My wife, Penny, and I have bought out our former partner, Todd, so we are now the sole owners of Union Grove Distillery. We're working on growing our ... our network of brands and getting more out there into the world via distribution. Well, we also grow our on premise sales here by hopefully any kitchen in the future, along with also adding Calico Outlaw Brewing to the equation and to become the Arkville Distilling and Brewing Center, which we're calling the new center of the universe.

Brett Barry  14:49  
It's ambitious.

John Fairbairn  14:50  
And I know shirts don't show up very good on radio. What's that say? John, read that. It says, "Arkville Distilling and Brewing: The New Center of the Universe, Catskill Mountains, Arkville, New York."

Brett Barry  14:59  
Where there's some latitude and longitude there. So John, tell me about how this came together.

John Fairbairn  15:06  
As one does when it's driving along in the Catskills by yourself and the radio cuts in and out, so you do a lot of talking and thinking to yourself, and I said to myself, "Why don't I open a brewery at my buddy Brian's place?" First thing I did is I didn't talk to Brian. First, I talked to my wife, got my wife's permission. Then, I talked to Brian, as one is supposed to do and said, "Hey, what do you think?" and he said, "Let's do it," so that started the process of building out the space and I have the equipment is in place and waiting on a couple of fine tuning on equipment side and my New York State License, which is pending, and hopefully in the next few months, I'll actually be open pouring beer.

Brett Barry  15:45  
What's your experience with brewing?

John Fairbairn  15:49  
Like most microbreweries, I started home brewing and decided what the heck.

Brett Barry  15:53  
Do you have a plan for some initial brews or ...

John Fairbairn  15:59  
I think, initially, it'll probably only be three or four beers when we actually open. A blonde ale because I'm not really a lager person and lagers are more time intensive to make, so Blonde Ale IPA, Hefeweizen, and then probably either a porter or stout and try to ... because I think one of the mistakes I see breweries make is they go too heavy on the IPAs and a lot of people don't like IPAs. I personally love them, but I know a lot of people that do not.

Brett Barry  15:59  
Yeah, I mean, the very popular. So I think breweries have gone all in.

John Fairbairn  16:06  
Yep, yep, they've gone all in. But, you know, one of the things that I thought about was a lot of my blue-collar friends are not IPA people. They're going to drink a lager. That's damn near clear to you and me and I'm not going to make that necessarily, but I'm going to try to find a blonde ale that or have blonde ale that I think is going to fit that bill perfectly.

Brett Barry  16:06  
Do you have a day job? Do you have ... is this going to be full-time like how are you going to balance?

John Fairbairn  16:23  
Right. My wife will tell you that I have no balance, but it might. My day job is I'm a lawyer and this is ... I think the brewery was job number five or six ... I don't remember now. I'm a brewer. I'm a part-time judge. I have a title company and we flip houses on the weekends, and then we have the ... that I started the brewery, so ...

Brett Barry  17:10  
Wow, so like a lot of people in the Catskills, so you got a varied ...

John Fairbairn  17:14  
You gotta wear a lot of hats. Yeah, many jobs for sure.

Brett Barry  17:18  
And that's quite a portfolio.

John Fairbairn  17:21  
Yeah, well, I ... it's Brian's fault because he got me into the house flipping, so it's his fault.

Brian Mulder  17:24  
No, you got me into house flipping.

John Fairbairn  17:24  
It was your fault, so once this last house is finished and sold, we are going to step back from house flipping and really concentrate on as John likes to say the Brewstillery. We're going to really try and make this the place in the Catskills for everybody to come. John will still have his full-time lawyer gig, but we're really going to change gears here and try to get this firing on ... on all 500 cylinders, really. We're going to be looking into a filing system for Union Grove; a shared canning system for Union Grove and Calico Outlaw because I'm also looking into doing canned cocktails as part of our portfolio.

Brett Barry  17:24  
Where does Calico Outlaw come from the name?

John Fairbairn  17:29  
So this goes back to Delaware County history in the 1840s. Tenant farmers were ... they were essentially cut out of equity because they couldn't buy land. Huge tracts of land were owned by the Patroons they were called, so these were people own that, you know, ten, fifteen, thirty, 80,000 acres at a time. So the tenant farmers rose up and there were something called the Anti-Rent War that happened here and in several counties around ... around us culminated in 1845 with the shooting death of the undersheriff whose name was Osman Steele. One of the guys are shot at Steele was an ancestor of mine, so I thought what better way to pay homage to our history here, then the Calico and the Calico part is they would wear disguises because they didn't want to necessarily be identified, so Calico sheets were a common thing, and then the outlaw part was because the ancestor of mine was there was an arrest warrant issued for him and he had to flee the area. The ... the authorities arrested his father, thinking he was harboring him. So I figured Calico Outlaw and it's been pointed out to me that the outlaw part is hilarious given that I'm a lawyer as well, but I decided to just go with it.

Brett Barry  19:14  
Brian, how's this space physically going to change or look different once you've got a brewery under the same roof.

Brian Mulder  19:47  
So once the brewery fires up, the brewery is owned by John separately from the Union Grove Distillery, so there is no easy access without going outside to get into his brewery. We can't have connected spaces because it's two separate businesses, but we will be selling all of his beer here on tap. So in essence it will be a taproom for John via the sale of his beer to us to pour; John would be behind the bar pouring tastes and talking up the beer when he ... when he can by having the brewery here plus the distillery and all the cocktails and all the people that we already have as fans and customers. We realized that we need food as well and all of our restaurant friends in the area agree and tell us that we need to have food. So one of the steps that we're going to be working on throughout the winter of 2024 will be to hopefully get a restaurant of some sort up and running. Probably not large ... we're not restaurant people, so we're going to take baby steps with that, but once we get the restaurant up and fired up with the taps going in the beer and the cocktails and games and the whole back room will be a great fun area, the front patio will be busy. We're hoping to do some additions in the side on the parking left side with the possible double storey deck, which would kind of act like a rooftop bar, which would be undercover, so we can have more room for people to sit and hang out.

Brett Barry  20:44  
Okay, so what makes your spirits and what's going to make your beer ... Catskills spirits and Catskills beer ... what grounds it in the place where we are?

Brian Mulder  20:57  
That's a good question. We try to use as much local grain as possible or maple spirit for example. We use local maple syrup that's brewed right up in Rider Hollow by Tree Juice. So that's super local. Some local grain whenever possible. The Catskill Mountain Water, I mean, how many reservoirs we have around us that are feeding New York City. The best ... the best water in the world is from New York City and that runs right through our backyard here, so the water is an integral part of our system both for the beer and for the spirits. Really? Right, John?

John Fairbairn  21:26  
And with the ... the breweries in New York ... farm breweries, so it has to use a minimum percentage of New York ingredients, so that's predominantly barley, oats, and potentially some other grains like corn and hops and my slightly longer term plan is to grow my own hops on the farm. Once I establish which hops that I really want and maybe which hops I can't really find that I'll grow them myself, and as Brian said, "Water is key." People come to this place for the water; we drink a lot of water just sometimes it's been distilled first.

Brett Barry  22:00  
And you have a family farm here that goes back quite some time, right?

John Fairbairn  22:03  
Yes, the Calico Outlaw part is on my mother's side, and on my father's side, we have two family farms that have been in the family for one farm, I don't know 160 years, something like that. The other farm is coming up on 100 years. I grew up on a dairy farm. Both of my parents grew up on dairy farms that goes way back. During the Great Depression, my grandfather, my father's father, bought his farm, paid it off in a couple of years, selling predominantly cauliflower in the green markets in New York City. So, you know, a funny thing about farming is that it all starts with the water. I'm thinking there's ... there's a theme there.

Brian Mulder  22:39  
Right now, the winter hours are only two days a week. Once summer hits, we will up our hours are probably looking at six days a week once the brewery and the restaurant are here and up and running. We're really going to be trying to stay open as many days as possible to really bring in folks from not just the local area but from out of town as well, so we're looking forward to meeting lots of new people. Come on down and see us!

Brett Barry  23:03  
Our final stop on this New Year's tour takes us to Westfield Brewery in the wilds of the Great Northern Catskills. I met up with owner, Mike Barcone, at 10:30 a.m. and considering the time of day I went with breakfast beer.

Mike Barcone  23:18  
What can I interest you in, Brett?

Brett Barry  23:19  
I think since it's morning, oatmeal stout sounds ...

Mike Barcone  23:25  
Absolutely. My name is Michael Barcone. I'm the owner of West Kill Brewing and we are here at our West Kill Taproom; our original location up in Westfield, New York.

The property's been in my family since 1929. My great-great aunt bought the property, and originally before that, it was the Dunham Farm and the Dunhams had the land for about 100 years as a dairy farm. Dairy was kind of falling apart in the Catskills: refrigerated milk trucks and refrigerated railroad cars had come into play, so there were better places to raise cows for dairy, so people didn't need local or hyperlocal farms anymore, and so they could get better quality and also cheaper dairy products from elsewhere in the state. So the Dunham family had a hard time sustaining the property at after that point, especially when the creamery shut down in Lexington, so ... so they decided to sell the land, and then in 1929, my great-great aunt bought it. She had no children. She worked as a paralegal, essentially for a law firm in New York City and she grew up in Virginia in the Shenandoah Valley. So when she saw the Catskills and came up here, she just fell in love with it. So I was a history teacher before I got into brewing. I went to college in Boston. That's where I met Colleen, who also owns the brewery with me and, you know, worked in museums and was very, very passionate about history, and so I taught high school history for a few years and brewing was just really a hobby for me. I grew up here making hard cider with my grandfather like through high school and, you know, coming home from college. You always tried to get in and make hard cider. Fermentation was really cool to me. Yeah, it made sense that beer was the next jumping point. I really enjoyed the fact that, in two weeks, you had a product instead of waiting, you know, months and months, you know, for cider and even longer for wine. So the idea of being able to do beer in my apartment was ... was pretty attractive; made the whole building smelled like oatmeal. But yeah, it was ... it was a fun hobby and it grew and grew into an idea of like ... "Man, I, you know, I'd love to own a brewery one day." We lived in Boston long enough. It was a great time, but this we wanted to get ... get back into the woods and we would come back here pretty often and it was actually my dad who talked us into coming back here because he said, you know, number one: there's teaching gigs around. But also, you know, the Catskills are kind of coming back. He was like ... younger people are moving in the area. There's newer businesses forming and this is back in 2012-2013, so ... really ... it was like ... "Well, you know what? We love the Catskills. We want to go back." Who has ... Sue says, "We have to stay in New England at least we have some family nearby there." Let's ... let's go back to the Catskills and, you know, kind of one thing led to another, you know, New York had just passed the farm brewery bill, which was a big deal and it's very historically for New York brewing is a big deal because it opened up huge tax incentives for people to grow hops and people to grow grain and also for people to brew beer with those ... those ingredients. So my father kind of put this idea in our head of like ... "Why don't we do a small little brewery in the sap house and, you know, you can teach or what have you, and then have this little hobby ciders that goes with the farm bill. We can get tax credits on the property. Shortly thereafter, we moved back. My father passed away and Colleen had lost her father a couple months earlier, so losing our dads back-to-back very suddenly was a real kind of kick in the ass for us to say like, you know, what ... what do we really want? What do we want to do ... and I was kind of tired of being knocked around the public school system, and I said, "You know what I want to be ... I want to be my own boss. I want us to build something, you know, and the idea for the brewery was born." So I immediately went to school at the Siebel Institute in Chicago for brewing science; took quite a few courses out there, and then, you know, we immediately just started building the idea of the brand and what we wanted to make and what we wanted to brew. The valley has such a great energy. It's such a beautiful place. I said, "Who wouldn't want to come and have a beer here?" So for us, it was very important that West Kill be located here and West Kill was the name from day one because I just think it's a great name and it just kind of stuck, and so we said, "Well, West Kill Brewing should be ... should be here in West Kill and the Spruceton Valley, and so we had to go through that process of the DEP and the DEC and going ... getting all ... all of our ducks in a row within the four years that took us to build a brewery and it did take us four years. When we finally opened Memorial Day weekend of 2017, I sold out my first batch by the time we opened because I had accounts lined up for some of them for two to three years. Peekamoose is a prime example of one, so we hit the ground running as soon as ... as soon as the brewery opened, but the other thing that I realized in building the brewery and developing it was that I ... I needed someone else. You know, Colleen and I had skills, but I was, you know, as ... as it went on, I was like I need someone who has some commercial brewing experience to come in here and be a ... be a part of this with us and thus enters Patrick Allen, who's been our head brewer now since we ... since we opened and actually he came on about six months before we opened. Patrick's been here since day one and he is absolutely integral to everything that is West Kill and the development of our ... of our beer recipes. There's things I would do differently and there's things that I wouldn't change at all. But yeah, that's kind of the story of how we got to be where we are.

Brett Barry  29:12  
What's one thing you do differently?

Mike Barcone  29:13  
Man, one ... one thing I do differently, I'd make my brewery bigger. I ... I'd find a way to build the footprint and I would definitely make my walking cooler, but everybody tells you these things in the beginning, but it's absolutely true, you know, and when you're going to open a business, yeah, you better double the amount you think you need to open it because that's for sure.

Brett Barry  29:32  
I feel the same thing about my studio.

Mike Barcone  29:33  
Yeah.

Brett Barry  29:35  
It's way too small.

Mike Barcone  29:36  
Exactly. I mean, if I had to pick one number and one thing that would be it.

Brett Barry  29:40  
But you did expand into Kingston, so tell me about that venture which happened this past year.

Mike Barcone  29:46  
There were several breweries in New England that we really respected and really, you know, even gave us a lot of information to get our feet off the ground here and one of them had just expanded into a new tasting room facility in Portland, Maine. Their brewery is in a very ... it's Oxbow Brewing. Their original location is in very, very rural area of Maine, and then they expand into a more urban environment for their secondary taproom, so from day one, we kind of had this idea of going of like ... West Kill would be our base, but like it would be really cool to have an outpost or a satellite location; somewhere in the Hudson Valley near the river, connect the river to the mountains. Kingston was always the obvious choice for me because I grew up in Kingston with ... with a family business in Kingston. I knew Kingston. I liked Kingston. It was on the up-and-up and the big thing with Kingston was it had infrastructure, it had buildings, it had ... there was ... there was real estate there that you could get in on at least for lease or what have you to develop something whereas the other towns were kind of not ... not quite there yet. I think now it's changed, but when we were first looking about three years ago, it was Kingston just kept coming up being the obvious choice. A couple of the big reasons we did it. One being here in West Kill ... we're in the wilderness. It's a wild place up here, right, and the weather can change on a dime. So a rainy day, a sleety day, a snowy day, you know, Saturdays are the biggest day of the week. We could get a Saturday that's just bombed out of here because of a snowstorm or an ice storm or what have you, so for us to have the ability to have a tasting room that we knew that generally speaking would be open, you know, most of the time that could be kind of, you know, when we're getting twenty inches of snow up there and Kingston is getting rain at least we would have a place where people are coming in and ... and, you know, enjoying themselves and we're not fully out on a day's worth of pay and production, so that was one of the big reasons we did it. The other reason was expanding retail is always, you know, the better option rather than expanding wholesale, right? If ... if there is a demand for your product and people come and get it from you, then, you know, you should grow horizontally rather than vertically, and so that was kind of the other big motivator and I think Kingston was ... was ready for something that we were looking to offer, so that's ... that's how supply came to be, and then it was a year of very, very tedious renovations to that space. The finished product we have is just a really beautiful showpiece for the brand and I think really brings the idea of the Catskills Boarding House to Kingston. That's kind of the vibe we were going for. It's like what would a 1890s guesthouse in the Catskills in the, you know, the Lexington and Hunter area? What would the ... what would it feel like inside and that's kind of what we were going for with the beadboard and the wallpaper and I think we really kind of nailed it.

Brett Barry  32:38  
Yeah, you did. I've been there and it's amazing. It's brings the coziness of this space to Downtown Kingston right across from UPAC.

Mike Barcone  32:46  
Yep.

Brett Barry  32:46  
A great location.

Mike Barcone  32:47  
Totally.

Brett Barry  32:48  
And whether you're raising a glass in the Kingston Taproom or the West Kill Taproom, Mike explains what you can expect from the actual beer.

Mike Barcone  32:57  
We like to make three different kinds of beers here, you know, in West Kill. The primary is like we just like to make beers that are true to a style and they're done well and they're clean and they're not overly intense and you're not throwing in, you know, graham crackers and marshmallows and all that like we're just, you know, you want to ... you want a black lager? We're going to make a really good black lager, so that's kind of the first style of beer here we make. Another kind we do is what we call our forged beers are herbed beers and these are beers like the leave it be, where you're having a traditional style like an English mild, but instead in the mash, we're adding a ton of oak and maple leaves that give it this kind of like a nutty kind of bitter quality to the beer and it's just something unique and it's something different and it lends itself to the style. We do a beer called "Sap Haus," which is a maple brown ale, but we take the maple side a step further where we toast actual maple bark and we add the bark from these mature maple trees to the mash as well, and again, it gives it this like toasty cracker character on top of the hint of maple that ... that's in there as well and we do a series in the summer of IPAs that we use various herbs in like Tulsi basil. We also do a creeping thyme beer where we harvest creeping thyme from the fields and that's called "Forsaken Fields" and the creeping thyme goes ... goes right into the ... into the fermenter cold and, you know, that's a beautiful saison that we make, so that's like these herbs kind of forged beers are the ... are the second tier of beer and making them. The third is kind of, you know, working with local producers on various styles probably my number one would be like the "Dark Hollow Chocolate Porter" that we make with the nibs from fruition chocolate that they're ... that they're producing down there. So collaborating with other various local businesses in the area to create things that are pretty unique and cool and funky, but yeah, we've done beers with mushrooms with ... we've done beers with reishi, we've done beers with chaga. We did a "Chanterelle Pilsner." You know, if we find an opportunity to do something cool with forged ingredients from the mountains, we will, and if we can find someone locally to partner with, whenever we can we try to collaborate.

Brett Barry  35:11  
And that collaboration extends to food up at West Kill.

Mike Barcone  35:15  
But, you know, I listen. Everybody tells you ... don't get into food and I agree wholeheartedly and/but people really do want to be able to have a meal, so the food truck program has been really great bringing in rotating food trucks. We get a lot of people here. This is a very busy place in the summer and there are so many people around that this is what they do like they handle crowds. They're phenomenal chefs and they're like they're on it. This is what they do. They don't care about producing beer. They don't need to worry about that. They make amazing food and those are the people that we have rotating in here now, so like this winter, we're doing these month-long residencies where, you know, one like Olsen & Company out of Saugerties will be coming in for a month. Briskethead will be here for a month, you know, doing these month-long residencies and that's something we're going to carry through the year. We do have our own food truck on site that we do utilize from time to time. But yeah, for the ... for the most part now, it's ... it's bringing other people in. For 2024, we are working on some ticketed dinners here; specialty ticketed dinners at the brewery up here. We're also bringing back our old program that we offered before the pandemic. One of the things that the pandemic kind of ended was our West Kill fishing game program. We're going to be bringing that back in 2024 once a month we're going to be offering seminars that take place either here or at our Kingston location and these seminars are going to range, you know, in the past we've had turkey hunting seminars from the great local turkey hunter, Bob Monteleone, we've had tons of foraging walks, we're going to be offering a lot more of those to fishing game members, we've had the Catskill Forestry Association came and gave us how to manage your property for wildlife, so there's going to be a lot more educational programs that revolve around fishing, hunting, homesteading, you know, getting outdoors in the Catskills. It won't just be hunting and fishing. It'll be an expansion of a lot of different programs, but that's kind of what West Kill fishing game is and we're gonna be bringing that back in 2024, so we're excited for that.

Audio  38:07  
[SONG: "Auld Lang Syne"]