By Kurt Bresswein | For lehighvalleylive.com

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Since rolling out its new PA Preferred Brews initiative two months ago, the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture says six beers have qualified for the promotional label.

Three are from Bonn Place Brewing Co. in Bethlehem.

Owner/brewer Sam Masotto concocted the most recent addition on Nov. 14, using 100 percent Pennsylvania-sourced ingredients.

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Anymore, Then, Awhile is what Masotto calls an "anomaly beer," in that it's somewhat hard to classify. Its name derives from peculiarities of regional speech Masotto has picked up on.

A New York State native, Masotto got his start brewing beer when he and his wife, Gina, lived on Bonn Place in Weehawken, New Jersey. He was bartending and interning with brewers when he decided to open a brewery, and the couple fell in love with Bethlehem during a performance at SteelStacks of "Tony n' Tina's Wedding," a touring play they starred in for eight years.

Masotto gutted then reclaimed as Bonn Place Brewing a commercial building at 310 Taylor St. on South Side. It used to be a plumbing supply shop, delivery-only Pizza Hut and possibly a fish market.

"Somebody told me the other day it was a candy shop," Masotto said. "I don't know about that."

Opening day was July 31, 2016. This year, Bonn Place won a silver medal for its flagship Mooey Ordinary or Special Bitter and a bronze for Nemo, an English-style Mild Ale, at the Great American Beer Festival in Denver.

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Making Bethlehem home for himself, Gina and their new baby, Masotto has gone all-in on Pennsylvania: Witness the keystone in the Bonn Place sign, and state flag hanging beside the stars and stripes over the entrance.

His commitment to using Pennsylvania-sourced ingredients is a balancing act between creating unique beers and economics. It's a tradeoff, in part, to avoid charging $7-8 a beer, he said: "That's my commitment. That's not my customers' commitment."

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Sam Masotto, owner/brewer at Bonn Place Brewing Co. on South Side Bethlehem, leads production Nov. 14, 2017, of a 100 percent Pennsylvania ingredient-sourced beer, a farmhouse/New England-style pale ale to be called Anymore Then Awhile.

Kurt Bresswein Photo | For lehighvalleylive.com

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"I don't use local whenever possible because if I used local whenever possible I would use local all the time." Masotto said ahead of brewing the all-Pennsylvania beer Nov. 14 at Bonn Place. "But I wouldn't be able to make the beers I want to make because there's an availability issue, and of course it's cost-prohibitive.

"So our commitment to local is: For every pallet of grain that we order from a big distribution company, I order one beer's worth of grain from Deer Creek. I would use Double Eagle, who's another Pennsylvania malting facility, I would absolutely use their malt, but we just have a relationship with Deer Creek and we work with them a lot."

Bonn Place brews about 60 times a year, or five a week.

For Anymore, Then, Awhile, Masotto was joined for the brewing by Mark Brault and Trevor Sareyka, founder/chief maltster and malthouse manager, respectively, at Deer Creek in Glen Mills. Also there were Adam Dellinger, owner/farmer at Sunny Brae Hops in Carlisle, source of the Cascade, Chinook and Nugget hops that went into the beer. Richard Conn, a home brewer from Hanover Township, Lehigh County, supplied the wild yeast he grew, and the City of Bethlehem piped down the water from its Pocono Mountains reservoirs.

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PA Preferred Brews

Gov. Tom Wolf rolled out PA Preferred Brews on Sept. 29, as a way to boost Pennsylvania breweries that use Pennsylvania-sourced ingredients. Beer is a nearly $6 billion annual business in Pennsylvania, with more than 300 licensed breweries, The Associated Press reported at the time.

Prior to the launch, the Agriculture Department had 25 brewery members in its PA Preferred program already in place for Keystone State agricultural products, said Ashlee O. Dugan, PA Preferred coordinator.

"Since the launch on September 29 we have accepted a dozen new breweries into PA Preferred," Dugan wrote in an email. "We have received countless inquiries about the program as well as requests about how breweries can source local ingredients.

"So, we are doing that work, connecting brewers with growers and I'm confident that our numbers will continue to increase as breweries are able to demonstrate their commitment to local sourcing."

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Sam Masotto, owner/brewer at Bonn Place Brewing Co. on South Side Bethlehem, talks with Mark Brault, founder and chief maltster at Deer Creek Malthouse, during production Nov. 14, 2017, of a 100 percent Pennsylvania ingredient-sourced farmhouse/New England-style pale ale using Deer Creek malted barley and oats.

Kurt Bresswein Photo | For lehighvalleylive.com

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To qualify to use the PA Preferred trademark, a beer must be:

Brewed in Pennsylvania.

Brewed to meet standards for quality, sanitation, safety and labeling.

And produced from Pennsylvania-produced agricultural commodities — like hops and grains — to the extent they are available given market availability and product seasonal restrictions.

The initiative aims "to strengthen the relationships between breweries and farmers in Pennsylvania," Dugan said.

"As those connections increase and the availability of Pennsylvania-grown grain and hops expands, success will be measured by efforts to source local ingredients for Pennsylvania beers," she wrote.

For breweries like Bonn Place that don't can or bottle their beer to drink off-site, PA Preferred brewers can get a promotional tap handle, logo and stickers.

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'Step in the right direction'

In the days after the PA Preferred Brews rollout, news of the promotion was slow to reach some brewers, said Troy Reynard, owner of Two Rivers Brewing Co. in Easton and president of the Lehigh Valley Brewers Guild.

"I think it's a step in the right direction," he said at the time. "I think if they really want people to latch on to it they need to do some marketing."

Using Pennsylvania-sourced ingredients is a question of cost and availability, Reynard agreed. Locally produced malted grains are "several times more expensive than other commercial malts," and hops growers need to invest in equipment to pelletize their product so more brewers can take advantage of it, he said.

Reynard said he's bought ingredients for Two Rivers from several local hops farmers, including Wasser Hops outside Hellertown, as well as malt from Deer Creek.

"So kind of whenever we can do it in a way that makes sense we'll do it," he said. "Us and I think the rest of the members of the guild aren't afraid to produce a beer with local ingredients and then charge a premium for that. That's a beer that's going to be $7 a pint.

"But the customer benefits from knowing that the raw materials were produced and it was brewed locally."

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Hops from Sunny Brae Hops in Carlisle, Pa., are on display during brewing of a 100 percent Pennsylvania ingredient-sourced beer Nov. 14, 2017, at Bonn Place Brewing Co. in Bethlehem.

Kurt Bresswein Photo | For lehighvalleylive.com

How-to for hops

At Sunny Brae, Dellinger, the owner, cultivates 2 acres and is bringing on 3 more acres next year.

There are three ways to use hops, beginning with wet hops that are taken from the field to brewery within less than 24 hours of harvesting.

"That gives a beer a very special character," said Dellinger, who just finished his fourth growing season. "It's a little more fresh-tasting and maybe a little more vegetable-tasting, and it's a very special beer you can only do once a year at harvest time.

"The other type of hops you can use are dried whole-leaf, so we take that hops coming from the field and dry it down ... and it stays intact in its original form. And it still looks like a hop cone and then you put that into beer.

"And then the last step, the most popular way, is you pelletize it. So we take that dried hop cone, run it through a hammer mill, pulverize it then press it into a pellet and those pellets will store a little easier and the brewer's equipment is usually set up to use pellets. So we are one of the only facilities in the state that can pelletize hops that we grow here, so it's a very special process and new to Pennsylvania."

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Trevor Sareyka from Deer Creek Malthouse pours some of the hundreds of pounds of Deer Creek malted grains being used during production Nov. 14, 2017, of a 100 percent Pennsylvania ingredient-sourced farmhouse/New England-style pale ale at Bonn Place Brewing Co.

Kurt Bresswein Photo | For lehighvalleylive.com

Malted grains, explained

At Deer Creek, Brault said theirs is Pennsylvania's first new malting operation since Prohibition ended. They use the traditional process to malt grains, primarily barley, wheat and rye but also buckwheat, sorghum, oats and, new this fall, Pennsylvania-grown corn.

Malting adds value to the grain and provides a higher revenue stream for farmers, Brault said. In addition to grains grown by Deer Creek on its 40 acres, the malthouse also works with a network of farms within 50 miles, primarily in Pennsylvania, he said.

The malting process is basically controlled germination: Grain is steeped in water to rehydrate the living embryo in the kernel. Then it is allowed to germinate and spout in a thin bed turned over every six to eight hours for about four days. That sprouted, modified grain is then dried to preserve the enzymes that have developed and to develop new flavors.

"The drying and curing process, or kilning, is where a lot of the color and flavor development happen in the malting process," Brault said.

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Yeast from just east

Conn, from outside Allentown, has been home-brewing for about 15 years but just started growing his own wild yeast this year. It's grown in his back yard or on the windowsill of his garage in about a day, in a process that starts with boiling dry malt extract.

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Josh Fryauff stirs malted barley and oats in the mash tun during brewing of a 100 percent Pennsylvania ingredient-sourced beer Nov. 14, 2017, at Bonn Place Brewing Co., 310 Taylor St. in Bethlehem.

Kurt Bresswein Photo | For lehighvalleylive.com

Third recipe recognized

Anymore, Then, Awhile is Bonn Place's third PA Preferred Brews recipe recognized by the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, following a grisette called Savage Glory that used sage grown along the South Bethlehem Greenway and Tart Blackberry Tarte, a fruited sour built around Pennsylvania-harvested blackberries.

The other beers that have qualified for PA Preferred Brews status are pale ales from the Harrisburg area, two from Millworks and one from Appalachian Brewing Co., according to Dugan.

"Only one new brewery member has submitted recipes, Bonn Place Brewing in Bethlehem," she said by email. "The other breweries that have official brews were already members of PA Preferred prior to the launch of PA Preferred Brews (ABC and Millworks)."

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"This beer is a Pennsylvania pale farmhouse ale, so what I mean by that is it's very much going to be in the, sort of, New England IPA style," Masotto said. "So it's going to be aggressively dry-hopped and pretty aggressively hopped because I do want those flavors to shine or to be prominent.

"I want to be able to feature those hops, but you need to be able to have that malt backbone and I want to be able to prominently feature the malt, as well, because if not for being able to do that, what's the point of using certain ingredients if you can't taste them?"

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It should be ready to pour the first week in December.

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Kurt Bresswein may be reached at kbresswein@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @KurtBresswein. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.