Brewer's Day at the Copper Fox Distillery (10/20/2016)

 I took a rare "zymological" week-day holiday today to make use of a kind invite from Charlie Wise over at the Copper Fox Distillery in Sperryville, VA. It was their Brewer's Day and I was privileged to be able to hang with brewers from several local micros who plan to use their specialty malts. The Copper Fox uses only Virginia-grown wheat, barley, oats and rye for their spirit distillery and they recently expanded their floor malting operation to supply malts to local and regional breweries. This will grow even more once their new Williamsburg facility comes on line. Besides the floor malting facility, they also do their own kilning and smoking with local apple and cherry wood. I can't wait to try some of this in a future batch here at the Food Patch Nano  (Charlie giving us the low down on their floor malting operation; click for larger images)

Touring the distillery hall.

Their main still, appropriately back dropped.

Release of Raspberry Melomel-2016

In the bottle and doing fine!

Quad State Beerfest 2016

Yesterday was the second and last Quad State Beer Fest for 2016 and a good time was had by all. I continue to be amazed at the level of mastery in today's graft beer movement. If I only knew way back in the late 1980s what I know now I am sure I would be in a totally different line of business. I am particularly amazed at the new "wild" brewer movement. These folks are pushing aside the commercial yeast strains in favor of their very own locally derived cultures. Together with locally sourced hops and malt we are seeing the term "terroir", normally reserved for the wine trade, making its way into the craft beer vernacular. And as if there weren't enough variables to play with in the brewing hobby already, I'm beginning to develop a taste for the sour beers. I guess I'm going to have to relax my strict microbiological upbringing a bit to start playing around with these in the near future.