Rachel McDermott and Dancing Grain

In Memoriam Dept.: For quite a few years I wrote for the website knowwhereyourfoodcomesfrom.com, founded and eagerly maintained by Frank Barrie, a retired administrative law judge for the NYS Division of Tax Appeals. He was as passionate about the arts as he was about good food, and we’d often see each other at various concerts and plays. Below is the last piece I wrote for him. By the time I submitted it, I learned that he had died suddenly on October 1, just a week after he posted his last piece to the website.

                                                                                             

TRAVEL NORTH ON ROUTE 9 from Saratoga Springs NY and you’ll see the city’s urban characteristics fall away, revealing the rural aspects of the county. By the time you reach Dancing Grain Farm Brewery, which is in the town of Gansevoort or Moreau, depending on the map, it’s farm country. But the brewery’s parking lot is full of cars and you see people lined up to taste the beer or settled on the deck to enjoy it. This is Rachel McDermott’s dream come true but, like anything to do with farming, the easygoing nature of the place hides the tremendous amount of work that’s behind it.

“I didn’t buy a farm in order to brew,” she explains. “I built a brewery in order to farm.” But there’s a more complicated backstory to her mission, because she grew up here, on this farm, then left to become an investment banker. Her father, Jim Czub, and his brother Robert leased what eventually became over 2500 acres in the Moreau area, growing corn, soybeans, and hay. As land values increased in Saratoga County, they lost access to more and more of that land, eventually purchasing what has become the 308-acre brewery property in 2016.

That’s when Rachel decided to quit the financial business. “I hate to be inside,” she says. “I like getting my hands dirty. I felt a general unhappiness with the world around me and a sense that I needed to do something else.” She’d grown up with farming, but her return to that world was informed by her banking experience. She moved from Houston to New York and thus was able to visit the farm more often, how seeing it in term of its economic structure. “The tractor, a grain bin – these were investments. I asked myself, ‘Where are the inefficiencies?’” A shift toward value-added crops would be beneficial. “But what would those crops be? The season is short.”

Two factors came together. One was legislative: Spurred by the success of the 1976 Farm Winery Act, New York passed a law in 2012 requiring anyone with a Farm Brewery license to source at least 20 percent of the hops and the same percentage of other ingredients from New York; that percentage rose to 60 percent in 2019 and will top out at 90 percent in 2024.

Rachel McDermott

The other was agricultural. She set up her own small grains testing program, growing dozens of varieties over the course of five years, seeing what worked best on her land and in this micro-climate. She also was experimenting with what would be most sustainable, rotating crops, planting cover crops, and learning how to repurpose anything that promised further usefulness.

McDermott soon set her sights on growing malting barley, which hasn’t been successfully cultivated on any appreciable scale in this state for decades. Malting barley is a beer ingredient that works in conjunction with hops, yeast, and water. Regular barley has a grain that is dead but still nutritional, but grains in malting barley must still be alive and germinable. This is what converts the barley starches into the sugar that will feed the yeast and ferment.

The challenge of growing this type of barley in New York’s climate is keeping the grain from sprouting before harvest. Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences has been studying the challenge in its own test plots, and McDermott, a Cornell graduate, has carried that even further, planting several successive spring and winter grain plots and realizing failure after failure until she discovered what would work in her fields.

Given the investment that’s already been made in equipment,” she says, “I thought that a shift toward value-added crops would be beneficial. There’s already been a family grain business here for many years, so I decided that a brewery would be logical expansion of that.”

Alongside the grain experiments, McDermott and her husband moved a camper onto the property and took up residence with their dog, horses, and baby while renovations to the farmhouse were begun. “The farmhouse was vacant,” she says, “so it made sense to turn it back into a residence. Of course, we were doing this when the pandemic hit, so that complicated things.”

As she settled back into farming, she took another look at her product. “After producing barley for five years or so, I saw that it’s a lower-yielding crop with a higher risk attached, so that growing and handling was not the best fit. So I pulled out of supplying grain to breweries and decided to make the beer right here instead. I figured that if I can make really good beer, I can also show other farmers how this product can be used.”

A visitor discovers that the farm is a family-friendly place often boasting food and activity. You’ll find food trucks there often. There are large-screen TVs around when there’s a Bills game or other sports event to follow – and there were even tailgate parties over the summer for some of those Bills games. “We encourage people to bring friends, spend some time here, have a cook-out,” says McDermott. “We even had a chili cook-off yesterday.”

You’ll find live music on Fridays and Saturdays, and the plan is to do even more events and festivals in the coming months. “We’ll be open Fridays and Saturdays in winter, but we’ll also do private events like Christmas parties and rehearsal dinners. It’s been very nice to get to know our customers, and some of them come every week.”

There are a dozen different beers on tap at any given tap. Here’s what my (adult) daughter and I sampled on a recent visit.

Sweet Bee, an American IPA, was a first choice because of the sunflower honey in its formula. It’s described as a honey-rye pale ale, “sweet and spicy with a tinge of bitterness to round out the caramel notes provided by over five gallons of sunflower fed honey.” We found it to be pleasantly hopsy, like an East Coast IPA; denser and sweeter than a West Coast IPA (this according to my IPA-enthusiast daughter), and a  little lager-like in its finish.

As a dark-beer fan, I was delighted with their porter that day, called Picture Perfect. We’re told to expect “expect aromas and flavors of toffee, chocolate, and lightly roasted coffee.” I found it to be not as dark chocolate-like as I expected from its color, but it was very drinkable and I long for a serving of fish and chips to pair it with.

Lady Liberty is their very dark American stout, again with chocolate and coffee among the descriptors and with a smooth, easy-to-drink finish. I tasted both fruit and a very profound coffee finish. Take that, Guinness!

The fields beyond the tasting area were aburst with sunflowers, so the pale ale called Spinning Jenny has an appropriate floral match. It’s fermented with Belgian yeast, very citrusy. An old-school pale ale that bites back in the best possible way.

In the pursuit of keeping it local, 150 pounds of fresh peaches were turned into a puree to flavor the kettle sour called Kiss My Peach, and that flavor was very evident in the sour context. The beer is tart but offering just enough sweetness to keep the blend pleasant.

We also sampled a Marzen lager called Stallbrenner, a good Oktoberfest beer, lighter in flavor than its color suggests, but with a toasted-bread flavor coming through and an almond-y finish.

Right now there are no cans of Dancing Grain beer to take home. “We’re doing growlers now, for people who want to do pickups,” McDermott explains. “We’ll try an online sales model when we can find one that works for us. Right now the distribution industry is so saturated that we’re going to wait. Things need to be easy.”

Although distilling is another route that has gained local traction, “Beer is an affordable luxury,” she says. “Distilling takes time. From an investment perspective, beer is an easier way to maintain cash-flow.” And she likes having it centered on her farm. “I love my dog, my horse, my family,” she explains. “I feel a tremendous sense of gratitude. But,” she adds, echoing every farmer everywhere, “there sure can be a lot of stress.”

– 6 October 2023