At Kent Falls, Brewing as an Anachronism

Connecticut’s Kent Falls Brewing Co. aims to return brewing to its agrarian roots.

Kent Falls Brewing Co. calls 52 Acres of Kent, Connecticut farmland home (Photo: Derek Dellinger)

The small town of Kent, Connecticut is located on the border of New York. It’s home to a state park, three private schools, Henry Kissinger, and enormous second-homes hosting weekend getaways from northeast cities in all directions. It’s also home to 52 acres of farmland that Kent Falls Brewing Company calls home.

When I arrive, the parking lot overflows with cars adorning the light blue license plates of Connecticut, and one idling vehicle from New York with a backseat full of kids on iPads. Dad stands in line; Mom has her right foot on the from bumper of a white SUV, stretching her legs.

On a fold-out table sat 19 different bottles for purchase, each one some variety of farmhouse ale: funky, tart, dry, or a combination of the three. On tap, two New England Style IPA for growler fills. Customers left the taproom with boxes under one arm, and the handle of a growler in the other.

The property, a fully functioning farm, houses chickens and pigs, hop bines and acres of fallow. Life seems to revert to a different time. There’s an inclination to put the electronics away, to sit on one of the many picnic benches and just observe the grandeur. We’re more inclined, according to a recent article in The Atlantic, in states of awe to feel more connected both to the land or, if so designed, to a higher power.

It’s a property and business steeped in anachronisms. Historically, brewing went from taking place on farms with localized ingredients to being dominated by shiny, stainless steel facilities to industrial parks. Now, in some places, beer returning to it’s agrarian roots.

“This is an extremely inefficient operation,” said Barry Labendz, the hyper-kinetic founder of Kent Falls Brewing. “It shouldn’t take two and a half years to start a brewery.”

When the taproom opened in June of 2017, it marked the first moment of time that Kent Falls was without a major infrastructure project on the property.

Labendz founded Kent Falls on the desire to not only return brewing to its rustic roots, but also born out of mutual admiration, friendship, serendipity, and an eagerness to identify and refine the definition of farmhouse beers. This dream didn’t begin in our nation’s fifth state, but in New York, where both the founder and head brewer restlessly sought something more.

***

The Coolship (Photo: Derek Dellinger)

At the beginning of the decade, Derek Dellinger found himself disillusioned by a particularly difficult bout of writer’s block. He felt stifled by life in Brooklyn. He tried his hand at the guitar before discovering rather quickly he wasn’t talented.

“Maybe I was just getting bored,” Dillinger said.

Dellinger had been into beer for a while. He had cousins who home brewed, but a demonstration at a farmer’s market by John Lapolla from Bitters & Esters, a Prospect Heights homebrewing shop, led him to his calling.

“I ended up buying a brewing kit from them before they even opened their shop,” Dellinger said. “From there, I just spent a few years getting really intensely into brewing and writing about my various experiments on my blog, Bear Flavored. Which, actually, is how Barry eventually found me, and I got involved at Kent Falls.

“The last few years have been far and away the most insane and challenging years of my life,” Dellinger wrote to me via e-mail.

In 2014, just before Kent Falls opened, he’d been writing a book about his year eating only fermented foods. That book, The Fermented Man, came out in 2016.

“It turns out trying to write and release a book while also getting a new business off the ground is a pretty insane undertaking,” he said.

Dellinger’s love and fascination with fermentation initially drove his curiosity into the beer world.

“He left his 10,000 hour skill, writing, and went into brewing,” said Evan Watson, a friend of Dellinger and the founder of Poughkeepsie, NY’s Plan Bee.

The two friends met while both were living in Beacon, N.Y., in what became a haven for young creative types like writers and artists and, as it turns out, brewers. Dellinger, at the time, wrote for the Bear Flavored blog, among other projects, and in a small piece, wrote about Watson’s operation in 2014.

“I think he thought I was crazy,” Watson said. The two became friends. “He’d come back from time to time to flesh out ideas.”

Dellinger’s beers marry two elements of brewing that Watson had never encountered in a home brewer: Brettanomyces and hops.

“As I got to know him and visited his little apartment in Beacon — it was the second story of a weird building on the outskirts, he had one room … he was homebrewing like a maniac,” Watson said. “It was all predicated on yeast … This little room has a special place in my heart. I started drinking his beers. I remember I cracked open a bear flavored beer. I was super impressed.”

When Dellinger had reservations about his professional future, he turned to Watson and presented him with three options: (1) a brewpub, (2) a job at another farm-forward New York State brewery, or (3) the gig at Kent Falls with “some crazy guy on a farm in picturesque Connecticut.” Watson, trying to implant himself into his friend’s shoes, suggested he should “absolutely do that,” referring to the third option.

“I was reading his blog and I liked the way he saw beer and thought about it and wrote about it,” said Labendz, who credits his love for beer to a semester abroad in Prague. “I liked the beers that he brewed when I eventually got to try them. He came over when we moved to the farm and started working on the brewery and talked about beer and homebrewing and said, you know, we should do this. And he did.”

At this point, Labendz grew comfortable on the farm, which was purchased alongside a business partner. He’d moved from Brooklyn in 2013 after purchasing the farm in 2012. The town of Kent, when it appeared on the list of properties provided by a realtor, provided a familiarity, having spent some time at summer camps hiking and when, it allowed, sneaking a beer or two.

“It sounds like the cheesiest thing,” he said. “But when we stepped onto the property, it was what we all imagined. It was very much what we wanted.”

The descendent of German immigrants, he left his cozy gig at a savings bank, working alongside his father in New York City, and set his compass northeast.

As paperwork on the brewery initiated, Labendz needed a name, so he settled on Food Cycle. As it turns out, one problem persisted, a Food Cyclist already existed.

“One day, I get this Facebook message from this guy claiming he was the Food Cyclist, and he biked across the country going from brewery to farm to brewery,” said Labendz. “And I just thought, ‘This guy is trying to steal our idea. Delete!’”

That e-mailer, John Suscovich, lived 11 miles away. He had started a similalar monickered company in 2013 after completing a 5,500 mile bike ride across the United States. They stayed at farms and worked at breweries across the country. Suscovich planned to blend their life on the farm raising chickens and growing herbs with a brewpub that could use ingredients from farm to glass.

Suscovich remained, as Labendz put it, “equally persistent,” and one day biked over to the brewery. The two had a beer and Labendz offered Suscovich a place at Kent Falls, with the title of Farm Manager.

“We were a young farm couple without a permanent address,” said Suscovich, who noted they were leasing farm land, “and Camps Road was a farm without full time farmers. We were a match.”

“[John has] Basically been here from the get go,” Labendz told me.

With Suscovich and his wife Kate on board, the team was set. To this day, all four — Labendz, Dellinger, and the Suscovich’s — live on the property.

Fermentation in full swing (Photo: Derek Dellinger)

***

Before the beer, there were significant legal and granular hurdles to tackle. For starters: There was no farm brewery law in Connecticut. Put at it’s most reductive, some lawmakers viewed beer making as more of an industrial thing because it wasn’t incidental to agriculture in the way that, say, growing grapes is incidental to making wine, or raising and milking cows is incidental to making cheese. The law needed to be written, and it needed to be written well.

A town like Kent holds their farms — and what they are allowed to produce — closely. Thus, these definitions needed to be amended.

Labendz worked closely with the Connecticut’s Department of Agriculture to get the farm brewery bill passed unanimously in the House. After passing in Senate, it’s now law.

“Just a law doesn’t get you anywhere,” he warned. “It has to be a good law.”

On top of the legal stuff, a pesky set of logistics persisted. Kent Falls spent a year in zoning.

“Starting a brewery is immensely difficult,” he said. “I would not trade this experience for anything in the world. If you knew how much work it took: How much cold space do I need? Three times more than what you’re planning. How much this? Three times more than you’re planning. How much money? Three times more than what you’re planning.”

Then there’s the added costs of renovations. The farm didn’t have bathrooms, they needed to update the septic system, demonstrate a plan for wastewater, ensure the driveway was wide enough, estimate the comings and goings of trucks and deliveries. All costs prohibited acquisition of critical equipment like fermenters or foeders.

An IPA in front of the hop yard that was it’s beginning (Photo: Derek Dellinger)

“I give the town of Kent a lot of credit,” he added. “They gave us approval unanimously. Worst case scenario, even if we can’t keep it totally local and end up using ingredients from elsewhere, is that we keep the farm in Kent. If we want to keep farms and stop a parking garage or more mini-mansions from popping up, we have to expand what our definition of a farm can be. I give them a lot of credit for that.”

Then he had to win over the people of Kent, were concerned and curious about what having a brewery in town would mean. He sat before boards and went to dinners. He schmoozed his neighbors, and told them all what a farm brewery would mean to Kent. Once the townspeople jumped on board, it was time for a well-deserved beer.

***

Dellinger and Labendz gravitated toward the same styles, so no argument as to which direction the brewery’s output would go developed. There’s an affinity for hop-forward beers (they do brew IPA’s), but the duo uses Kent Falls as a vehicle to drive consumers towards the hard-to-define style of farmhouse ales.

“There’s a lot of debate about what exactly ‘saison’ and ‘farmhouse’ even mean these days, but for us, I think the focus is just on making beers that are refreshing and easy to drink after a long day of exhausting work, regardless whether it’s fermented by ale yeast, saison yeast, Brettanomyces, or bacteria,” Dellinger wrote. “We wanted to prove that sessionable, accessible beer can be just as nuanced and complex as anything else.”

The most important syllable in the phrase “farmhouse ale” is “house.” Even beer brewed down the road should be distinct from one another because terroir and house cultures make significant differences regardless of proximity. Labendz liked this assessment.

“This is our farm,” he said. “This is our house beer. These are the yeasts we’ve been working with since our first batch of beer. It is a living culture. The idea of a house beer is flavorful, approachable, drinkable, light, and stand for the house beer, like, ‘What do you make?’

Beers like Semblance and Equinox, dry-hopped farmhouse ales, could both be considered house beers, but are both equally distinct.

“Farmhouse Ales, for the most part, are meant to be drank while farming. Or out at a big table sharing a locally harvested dinner. Evoking those feelings of the work and enjoying it with friends afterward. I always imagined farmers brewing in the winter, working in the field in the summer, tasting that barrel, and blending. There wasn’t the intent to define a style back then as there is now.”

Although Watson describes his own definition of farmhouse ales as “very regimented,” he did suggest that Kent Falls and his friend Dellinger does “as good of a job as anyone.”

“They’re at forefront of this,” he told me. “[Brewing farmhouse ales is about] trying to incorporate a sense of place and utilizing the limitations in ingredients that drive the flavor profile.”

That curiosity of experimentation and terroir without definition remains a core tenet of Dellinger’s brewing philosophy. In a significant sense, his brewing aims to push the boundaries of beer categories with a combination of open-mindedness and exploration.

“There was a lot of ‘conventional wisdom’ about certain elements of brewing, especially water profiles, that has been passed down since the 70’s that brewers only really started to question in the last few years,” he said.

“I think there are always interesting twists you can make to your beer by always questioning and experimenting,” he continued. “The basic process of making beer has been understood since the beginning of civilization, but it’s only very, very recently that there’s been both mainstream interest in making beer and a pool of modern technical knowledge to draw upon for doing so.”

In the first year, Kent Falls produced somewhere between 700–800 bbls, but their output of styles has become a showcase in prolificacy. Dellinger estimates that they brewed almost 100 distinct beers in their first two years of operations. The beers appear in Connecticut, but also New York (which makes sense, considering Labendz also has a hand in the Port Chester, NY distillery Never Sink Spirits) and Massachusetts. Their bottles have shown up, too, in places like D.C., Virginia, Maine, Vermont, and as far away as Copenhagen.

Breweries are often not just about the beer. It’s also about the land and the moments. The town of Kent was sanctioned in 1737 and settled in 1739. The land on Camps Road, home to the brewery, has changed hands just twice. There’s a continuity in this, in making yourself a part of a small community, but also in inviting people in.