Industrial Arts Yes Farms, Yes Beer, and the farms that made it happen
The beer: Industrial Arts Yes Farms, Yes Beer IPA
ABV: 6%
How we got it: Yes Farms, Yes Beer was announced on May 13, and I got it delivered last Tuesday. You can pick it up from the brewery, get it delivered if you're in Orange, Putnam, Rockland or Westchester counties, have it shipped if you're in New York. If you're lucky, you can also find it in select stores in NY and NJ.
Photo by Brian Ries/Drink Through This
What they say: “This latest banger is a 100% New York-grown hazy IPA that combines our hop fetish with our mission to promote local agriculture. Bursting with pineapple and lemon meringue, this one hints at sunny days to come and is easy to reach for again and again.”
What you say: This beer has a 3.76 on Untappd and a 90 on BeerAdvocate.
What Brian says —
Everything, these days, is local. So why not drink a locally produced beer? That’s the subject of this dispatch — my current go-to brewery, Industrial Arts, released the second iteration of their New York State-grown hazy IPA: Yes Farms, Yes Beer.
It’s a beer I like more for its mission than its flavor, which is saying it’s totally fine and drinkable but more of a statement sip than a tasty delight. Plus, I took a killer photograph of the can in my garden and so I had no choice but to explore it.
To start, I reached out to the brewery to get a sense of what, exactly, went into this gem to make it such a product of the Empire State. The ingredients list, according to the helpful staffer who runs their Facebook page, is this:
Germantown Pils
Red Winter Wheat
Flaked Oats
Munich 8
Raw Warthog Wheat
Blend of selected Cascade, Chinook, Centennial, and Copper hops
I don’t know much about any of those things, so, since this is a newsletter of discovery, let’s do a little research and break ‘em down.
Germantown Pils: Industrial sources their Germantown Pils from Hudson Valley Malt, a husband-and-wife-run malt house on the Hudson River about 100 miles north of New York City. He, a financial adviser by trade, and she, a radio executive, learned how to malt through a mix of YouTube videos, seminars and books, and swapped a horse barn for a malting house. Less than a decade later, they’re apparently one of the secrets to delicious, local craft beer. I want to know so much more about these two.
Red Winter Wheat: This is a type of American wheat malt that, depending on how much is used, either gives your beer a nice head, a creamy “mouthfeel,” or makes it a straight-up wheat beer. The majority of it is grown in western New York, according to Cornell, which ID’d Livingston, Monroe and Genesee as the counties that produce it the most.
Flaked Oats: These sound like a depressing cereal selection, but they’re not — they’re what brings the magic to many of our beloved IPAs, especially the haze and typical juicy vibes.
Munich 8: The malt! A brief Internet search suggests the Munich 8L malt is grown in Germany and thus, not a New York State product. No surprise there given its name. This type of malt gives the beer a strong flavor and more pungent aroma, the various listings say, and can help increase the ‘foaminess’ of the mouthfeel.
Raw Warthog Wheat: This is another type of winter wheat, which is to say it’s planted in the fall, goes dormant over the winter, then returns with a vengeance in the spring and harvested in the summer. One of the largest producers of Warthog in the Northeast is Oechsner Farms, which is located in New York’s fingerlakes region. Here’s a fun read about that on NYC Greenmarket’s website.
Blend of selected Cascade, Chinook, Centennial, and Copper hops: Hops! We still know next to nothing about the various blend of hops, so I’m not getting into it now. Soon, though, once we drink through a bit more beers we’ll tackle these and more.