At Dancing Grain Brewery, the field-to-glass beer is a family effort

20 Mar.,2023

 

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MOREAU — Rachel McDermott remembers the perks of growing up a farmer’s daughter, from the endless tractor rides to adventures amid nature. She also remembers the tribulations of her father’s career: long hours, lack of rest and financial burdens.

It’s what led her away from the farm and to pursue a much different life working a corporate career. But after seven years as an investment banker, she “traded in the patent pumps for s--t-kickers” and returned home to the grain fields.

Now, McDermott owns and operates Dancing Grain Farm Brewery, a field-to-glass brewery that opened in August at her family’s 308-acre farm, WestWind Ag, on 180 West Road in Moreau.

The beer is grown on the farm which was purchased by McDermott's dad, Jim Czub, and her uncle, Bob Czub Jr., after leasing it for more than three decades. Faced with a declining leasehold amid rapid growth in Saratoga County, the brothers bought the land in 2016, inheriting several dilapidated buildings, extensive competition and no additional cash flow. 

Around the same time, McDermott moved from Houston to New York City and was able to visit the farm more often, describing the trips home as both “inspiring and concerning” due to her financial background. It wasn’t long before she decided to leave her banking job behind to return to the farm, beginning its lucrative transformation into a regenerative brewing operation.

“I thought, ‘wow the farm looks so different,’ there were these new green bins and tractors and all of these new bells and whistles,” Rachel remembered. “It was glaringly obviously to me that these bins should be full all the time, these tractors should be working more, we should be using all of this equipment and deploying it towards value added crops and not just traditional commodities.”

Rachel drew inspiration from the state's farm brewery law that requires farms to sell beer made primarily from locally grown farm products in order to receive a brewery license. In 2017, she began a small specialty grains program providing products to area craft beverage producers and undertook the taxing effort of growing malted barley.

Malted barley, she said, hadn't been grown in the state in almost a century and thus wasn't suited to the region's microclimates. All she and other farm brewers had to rely on was a Cornell University grain study based on four-by-eight plots of land across the state. McDermott, a Cornell graduate, explained that growers used the data to select the varieties they believed would perform well on their land. “All of a sudden, you’ve got 20 farmers in the state growing 20 different varieties of barley and nine times out of ten, it’s a crop failure because the data on these small plots is not indicative of what you would do at a commercial scale.”

While her dad and uncle faced continued land loss year after year, they continued to fulfill McDermott's request for more land to grow barley that continued to fail. "Every year, they kept giving me more land, they kept listening to me and there was failure, failure, failure and then we would have these small glimpses of hope."

It took more than four years of both winter and spring trials and several catastrophic crop failures before finally finding a malted barley variety that they could grow successfully. The next step was renovations so, in 2021, McDermott and her husband Sean purchased a camper and moved their baby, dog, horses and cats from Schaghticoke to Moreau to undertake a full farmhouse renovation.

The brewhouse runs about a dozen different beers on tap, with a focus on quality over quantity and making each beer taste unique. “It’s about understanding the soil structure and its health and fertility, we have to care of the soil first which is a very different way of looking at beer than other breweries because we have a very ground up approach,” Rachel McDermott said.

She, along with her partners Bert and Christian Weber, the father-son duo that run Common Roots Brewery in South Glen Falls, plan on hosting a series of events to help build a community around craft beer, like an upcoming "friendsgiving" potluck where people can bring their own holiday treats and enjoy the beer on tap. Christmas events are currently in the works, as well as the installment of experiential features that will allow visitors to fully immerse in the picturesque property. 

Since welcoming guests through their doors months ago, McDermott said she and her husband have been overwhelmed by the community support. When she looks at the brewery that sits atop a plot of her family’s farmland, she sees over 100 years of combined grain growing knowledge and modern agricultural practices she and her family have applied to grow what she believes to be some of the best malted barley in New York. 

And while she’s still getting the hang of the customer service aspect as the brewery continues to exceed projected sales, she hopes visitors will appreciate the authenticity of the beer, which begins in the grain fields overlooked by the taproom before being sent to specialized malt houses and returning to be served into each customer’s glass.  

“I don’t know where else you’re going to go to get that full circle experience,” McDermott said. “It’s very personal to me that the beer is good because of what it’s showing you. It’s all the work my dad and uncle put in over the years. It’s leaving a really great career to support the family. It’s taking care of your environment and the land around it. And it’s inviting you, the public and everyone else to be part of that.”

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