Is Colorado Farm Brewery Making The Most Local Beer On The Planet

On a warm spring day in Colorado’s San Luis Valley, Josh and Wayne Cody jump a ditch to check on their rye crop, growing low and green in a 160-acre circle. Hop plants have begun their climb up wire scaffolds, and the father-and-son team stop to examine a low, water-filled groove where grape vines should be sprouting. “That’s a little grain,” says Wayne, on hands and knees, pulling out grass by the handful. “It’s coming. They’re just so slow.” The Codys hope to use the grapes in a new fruit-infused beer, the next in a line of estate beers they produce completely on site. The Colorado Farm Brewery, outside of Alamosa, is perhaps the only brewery in the world capable of producing a beer without using a single ingredient from outside of the farm. At the onsite brewery, you can buy a beer made from grain that was grown in the fields visible from the taproom and malted in the shed next door, whose yeast was cultivated out of the air and whose water came from the farm’s wells. Throughout the entire process, not one of the ingredients leave the Codys’ 360 acres. The beer is delicious and wide-ranging. From the subtle tones of the Farm Brewery’s Wheatverly, a light and refreshing wheat beer in the German tradition to the Stjøldasøl, a Norwegian-style smoked ale that tastes like a bonfire. Currently, only a few of the brewery’s many beers are completely estate, with others using some off-farm ingredients, but Josh says they’re working to become more self-sufficient. They’re still working on learning how to best grow hops in the San Luis Valley’s cold climate. The Batch #1 Belgian blonde is all estate, as well as a dunkle and porter. “When we saw the possibility of making estate beer, and bringing back an old-world method that the wine industry has always held, we almost felt like we had a moral responsibility to try,” Josh says. The beer is only available on the farm, and Josh says that part of the estate spirit is preserving the local feel.

Here’s Where You Can Get the 28% ABV Sam Adams Utopias Beer

Read article

“We’re trying to keep it an honest and authentic, local experience,” Josh says. “It can’t be reproduced anywhere else.” Ten miles out of Alamosa and surrounded by rolling fields and cattle, the Farm Brewery brings together a community not interested in going into town. On Friday nights, old friends sit around a fire outside as the sun sets over the rye field, dappling the area in shadows and a soft golden light. At the bar, a long-bearded man tells me he stops to buy a growler every time he passes through the area, calling it the best beer in Colorado. Josh sees estate beer as the culmination of the “farm-to-tap” movement because of the range of skills the process requires: You need to know how to grow high-quality grain, modify it to brewing standards, and turn the product into beer. Wayne Cody farms, Jason Cody malts, and Josh Cody brews. All three families live on the farm.

The barley grown by the Codys, which goes through the malting room Courtesy of the Colorado Farm Brewery Josh says the families project was spurred by desperation. Unable to compete growing barley doing business as usual, they were forced to find a way to add value to their product or sell the farm that had been in the family since Josh’s great grandfather homesteaded the 360-acre property in 1934. The Codys grew barley for Coors for 50 years until they couldn’t compete anymore. For the Codys, stagnant barley prices and rising production costs pushed the farm into increasing financial trouble. After Wayne’s dad died, the farm’s end looked inevitable. On the verge of selling the farm, Wayne called his sons, and they made a last-ditch effort to save the property and turned the farm into a malting facility.

The 10 Best Undiscovered Craft Beers Around the World

Read article

“I had it sold to a neighbor, and the night before my mom said, ‘No. I can’t sign those papers,’” Wayne says, letting loose a deep and buoyant laugh. “And I tried to tell her, you know, ‘We can’t do it.’ I had already enrolled in college.” While Coors, Budweiser, and Malt Europe buy grain at commodity prices and malt it themselves, craft breweries often buy grain already malted, and the Codys had been growing for generations. In 2006, when the Codys started malting, no equipment existed at their size. Malt batches are typically measured in tons, and the Codys were working in pounds. Unable to find anything that fit their small-scale needs, they took matters into their own hands, using equipment from the old dairy operation. “We modified one of the milk tanks and tried to malt in it,” Wayne says. “The brewer loved it in Alamosa. So we just continued from there.” At first, the Colorado Malting Company worked on a hyper-local scale, mostly selling malted grain to breweries in Del Norte (32 miles away) and Alamosa (10 miles away). The Codys gave away their first batch for free, just to see if it would work. They’d never modified grain before, but the breweries loved it, and the Malting Company was able to make a profit on the next round. Slowly but surely, they expanded their business, working with clients from Denver to Sweden. Looking back, Josh thinks they started at the Malting Company at the right time, when the craft market was still young, but consumers were interested.

An African Grain Could Be the Secret to Better Gluten-free Beer

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“When I was growing up, nobody talked about where anything came from. It was just how cheap you can get it at the biggest store,” Josh says. “Our generation, they started caring about, ‘Where was this grown?’ And I think that social change has something to do with our success.” Walking through the malting room, Josh runs the faintly sweet-smelling barley through his hands, and gestures to how they have expanded. They still use the modified stainless steel milk tank but have supplemented it with four others, arranged in a retrofitted shed. Josh shows me to another building. It’s rounded roof once sheltered machinery during the valley’s cold winters, but now houses the Malting Companies bagging facility, funneling malted grain into burlap bags, which they do by hand, and weighing them before distribution. Most recently, the Codys built a new building to expand the brewery, adding lagering tanks and a bottling line.

The Codys in charge of the Colorado Farm Brewery Courtesy of the Colorado Farm Brewery The Codys started the brewery in 2017, retrofitting an old machine shed from the original homestead. As the malting company and brewery got more popular, they began to contract grain from their neighbors. Keith Tolsma is one of them. He still grows for industrial malters, because of the volume, but says it’s refreshing to work with other farmers. He knows the Codys won’t back out on a contract, and they set the price between them. Tolsma is proud of the barley he grows with his dad, but doesn’t get to see his grain reflected in the product with industrial buyers. “I can see it full-circle now. So compared to the big breweries, I never get to see any of the end results. With malting company, I get to see every process,” Tolsma says. “It’s pretty fun for us as farmers to actually taste what we plant eventually.” Tolsma remembers a three-month period where the Farm Brewery was using his barley. He knew which batch went to which beer, and could pick up differences in the final product, giving him an immediate feedback on his grain he can’t get with a big company. He says keeping production in the San Luis Valley has other benefits as well. “If you can keep all the contracts with family farms right next door, you keep the money in the valley,” Tolsma says. “You keep the jobs for the small companies right next door. It employs more people.”

Yuengling and Hershey Just Made a Draft-Only Chocolate Beer

Read article

For Josh, the shrinking margins in barley production reflect the general state of agriculture in the U.S. As the industry sought bigger profit margins, farmers were left behind. When Josh was a kid, he remembers the neighbors coming together over games of cards. As he got older, that sense of community began to drift away, and he saw neighbors less and less. He says the farm brewery is bringing people back together. On Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, the only days the brewery is open, the neighbors pile in, and farm talk drifts over cold beers in the old storage shed. “I think we have the two polar extremes here, where we have the people who are willing to go to extreme lengths to come here and try what we do, because of the nature of our business, and then we have the general person who just wants to have a decent beer and doesn’t want to be in a city when they do it. I try to get the taplines to service both needs,” Josh says.

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While the Codys have been able to turn their farm around, they face the constant threat of their small industry being overtaken by more big corporations. Between 2012 and 2016, the Codys worked with the Development Resource Group to help find investors for the Malting Company. In the process, Josh says they shared their whole business model with the group, only to have two of its employees start a competitive craft malting company backed by big money in the neighboring county.

The interior of the Colorado Farm Brewery, where guests can see their beer being brewed Courtesy of the Colorado Farm Brewery “We tried for 10 years to try to make the outside world value the San Luis Valley to look at what we have here as an ecosystem, as a climate, as an agricultural reality, as something that actually has value,” Josh says. “We wanted to showcase where we come from to make it valuable, but instead what we did was we attracted large industrial business to come here and just exploit and use it in the same way they have the rest of the planet.” Josh says the malting company has had to be quick on its feet to stay ahead. With five separate malting tanks, they can experiment, and quickly create products for new buyers. They are currently moving into the gluten free-beer market, creating craft malted millet, buckwheat, and sunflower seeds. “I’m not a social revolutionary. I’m not a communist. I do think that industrialism has its problems and they’re oftentimes seen at the root level of human need,” Josh says. “It’s quite scary when industrialism comes in and takes over something as essential as agriculture to all of humanity.” The Codys have made farming possible, if not easy, but for Wayne it’s always been about keeping the property in the family. When Josh left for college, he didn’t necessarily want to come back, and didn’t think it was possible anyway. Small farms can’t support more than one family. But when Wayne and Jason asked him to move back, he threw away his career in academia and headed home. “I’m honored to do it, that’s how I would describe it,” Josh says. “When I was growing up here, I had uncles and cousins and a brother that I just assumed would take over the farm. I never thought I would be the one who would be here.”

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On a warm spring day in Colorado’s San Luis Valley, Josh and Wayne Cody jump a ditch to check on their rye crop, growing low and green in a 160-acre circle. Hop plants have begun their climb up wire scaffolds, and the father-and-son team stop to examine a low, water-filled groove where grape vines should be sprouting.

“That’s a little grain,” says Wayne, on hands and knees, pulling out grass by the handful. “It’s coming. They’re just so slow.”

The Codys hope to use the grapes in a new fruit-infused beer, the next in a line of estate beers they produce completely on site. The Colorado Farm Brewery, outside of Alamosa, is perhaps the only brewery in the world capable of producing a beer without using a single ingredient from outside of the farm. At the onsite brewery, you can buy a beer made from grain that was grown in the fields visible from the taproom and malted in the shed next door, whose yeast was cultivated out of the air and whose water came from the farm’s wells. Throughout the entire process, not one of the ingredients leave the Codys’ 360 acres.

The beer is delicious and wide-ranging. From the subtle tones of the Farm Brewery’s Wheatverly, a light and refreshing wheat beer in the German tradition to the Stjøldasøl, a Norwegian-style smoked ale that tastes like a bonfire. Currently, only a few of the brewery’s many beers are completely estate, with others using some off-farm ingredients, but Josh says they’re working to become more self-sufficient. They’re still working on learning how to best grow hops in the San Luis Valley’s cold climate. The Batch #1 Belgian blonde is all estate, as well as a dunkle and porter.

“When we saw the possibility of making estate beer, and bringing back an old-world method that the wine industry has always held, we almost felt like we had a moral responsibility to try,” Josh says.

The beer is only available on the farm, and Josh says that part of the estate spirit is preserving the local feel.

Here’s Where You Can Get the 28% ABV Sam Adams Utopias Beer

Read article

“We’re trying to keep it an honest and authentic, local experience,” Josh says. “It can’t be reproduced anywhere else.”

Here’s Where You Can Get the 28% ABV Sam Adams Utopias Beer

Read article

Here’s Where You Can Get the 28% ABV Sam Adams Utopias Beer

Ten miles out of Alamosa and surrounded by rolling fields and cattle, the Farm Brewery brings together a community not interested in going into town. On Friday nights, old friends sit around a fire outside as the sun sets over the rye field, dappling the area in shadows and a soft golden light. At the bar, a long-bearded man tells me he stops to buy a growler every time he passes through the area, calling it the best beer in Colorado.

Josh sees estate beer as the culmination of the “farm-to-tap” movement because of the range of skills the process requires: You need to know how to grow high-quality grain, modify it to brewing standards, and turn the product into beer. Wayne Cody farms, Jason Cody malts, and Josh Cody brews. All three families live on the farm.

Josh says the families project was spurred by desperation. Unable to compete growing barley doing business as usual, they were forced to find a way to add value to their product or sell the farm that had been in the family since Josh’s great grandfather homesteaded the 360-acre property in 1934. The Codys grew barley for Coors for 50 years until they couldn’t compete anymore.

For the Codys, stagnant barley prices and rising production costs pushed the farm into increasing financial trouble. After Wayne’s dad died, the farm’s end looked inevitable. On the verge of selling the farm, Wayne called his sons, and they made a last-ditch effort to save the property and turned the farm into a malting facility.

The 10 Best Undiscovered Craft Beers Around the World

Read article

“I had it sold to a neighbor, and the night before my mom said, ‘No. I can’t sign those papers,’” Wayne says, letting loose a deep and buoyant laugh. “And I tried to tell her, you know, ‘We can’t do it.’ I had already enrolled in college.”

The 10 Best Undiscovered Craft Beers Around the World

Read article

The 10 Best Undiscovered Craft Beers Around the World

While Coors, Budweiser, and Malt Europe buy grain at commodity prices and malt it themselves, craft breweries often buy grain already malted, and the Codys had been growing for generations. In 2006, when the Codys started malting, no equipment existed at their size. Malt batches are typically measured in tons, and the Codys were working in pounds. Unable to find anything that fit their small-scale needs, they took matters into their own hands, using equipment from the old dairy operation.

“We modified one of the milk tanks and tried to malt in it,” Wayne says. “The brewer loved it in Alamosa. So we just continued from there.”

At first, the Colorado Malting Company worked on a hyper-local scale, mostly selling malted grain to breweries in Del Norte (32 miles away) and Alamosa (10 miles away). The Codys gave away their first batch for free, just to see if it would work. They’d never modified grain before, but the breweries loved it, and the Malting Company was able to make a profit on the next round. Slowly but surely, they expanded their business, working with clients from Denver to Sweden. Looking back, Josh thinks they started at the Malting Company at the right time, when the craft market was still young, but consumers were interested.

An African Grain Could Be the Secret to Better Gluten-free Beer

Read article

“When I was growing up, nobody talked about where anything came from. It was just how cheap you can get it at the biggest store,” Josh says. “Our generation, they started caring about, ‘Where was this grown?’ And I think that social change has something to do with our success.”

An African Grain Could Be the Secret to Better Gluten-free Beer

Read article

An African Grain Could Be the Secret to Better Gluten-free Beer

Walking through the malting room, Josh runs the faintly sweet-smelling barley through his hands, and gestures to how they have expanded. They still use the modified stainless steel milk tank but have supplemented it with four others, arranged in a retrofitted shed. Josh shows me to another building. It’s rounded roof once sheltered machinery during the valley’s cold winters, but now houses the Malting Companies bagging facility, funneling malted grain into burlap bags, which they do by hand, and weighing them before distribution. Most recently, the Codys built a new building to expand the brewery, adding lagering tanks and a bottling line.

The Codys started the brewery in 2017, retrofitting an old machine shed from the original homestead. As the malting company and brewery got more popular, they began to contract grain from their neighbors.

Keith Tolsma is one of them. He still grows for industrial malters, because of the volume, but says it’s refreshing to work with other farmers. He knows the Codys won’t back out on a contract, and they set the price between them. Tolsma is proud of the barley he grows with his dad, but doesn’t get to see his grain reflected in the product with industrial buyers.

“I can see it full-circle now. So compared to the big breweries, I never get to see any of the end results. With malting company, I get to see every process,” Tolsma says. “It’s pretty fun for us as farmers to actually taste what we plant eventually.”

Tolsma remembers a three-month period where the Farm Brewery was using his barley. He knew which batch went to which beer, and could pick up differences in the final product, giving him an immediate feedback on his grain he can’t get with a big company. He says keeping production in the San Luis Valley has other benefits as well.

“If you can keep all the contracts with family farms right next door, you keep the money in the valley,” Tolsma says. “You keep the jobs for the small companies right next door. It employs more people.”

Yuengling and Hershey Just Made a Draft-Only Chocolate Beer

Read article

For Josh, the shrinking margins in barley production reflect the general state of agriculture in the U.S. As the industry sought bigger profit margins, farmers were left behind.

Yuengling and Hershey Just Made a Draft-Only Chocolate Beer

Read article

Yuengling and Hershey Just Made a Draft-Only Chocolate Beer

When Josh was a kid, he remembers the neighbors coming together over games of cards. As he got older, that sense of community began to drift away, and he saw neighbors less and less. He says the farm brewery is bringing people back together. On Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, the only days the brewery is open, the neighbors pile in, and farm talk drifts over cold beers in the old storage shed.

“I think we have the two polar extremes here, where we have the people who are willing to go to extreme lengths to come here and try what we do, because of the nature of our business, and then we have the general person who just wants to have a decent beer and doesn’t want to be in a city when they do it. I try to get the taplines to service both needs,” Josh says.

Century-Old Castles, Urban Renewal, and Czech Beer: The 4-Day Weekend in Prague

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While the Codys have been able to turn their farm around, they face the constant threat of their small industry being overtaken by more big corporations. Between 2012 and 2016, the Codys worked with the Development Resource Group to help find investors for the Malting Company. In the process, Josh says they shared their whole business model with the group, only to have two of its employees start a competitive craft malting company backed by big money in the neighboring county.

Century-Old Castles, Urban Renewal, and Czech Beer: The 4-Day Weekend in Prague

Read article

Century-Old Castles, Urban Renewal, and Czech Beer: The 4-Day Weekend in Prague

“We tried for 10 years to try to make the outside world value the San Luis Valley to look at what we have here as an ecosystem, as a climate, as an agricultural reality, as something that actually has value,” Josh says. “We wanted to showcase where we come from to make it valuable, but instead what we did was we attracted large industrial business to come here and just exploit and use it in the same way they have the rest of the planet.”

Josh says the malting company has had to be quick on its feet to stay ahead. With five separate malting tanks, they can experiment, and quickly create products for new buyers. They are currently moving into the gluten free-beer market, creating craft malted millet, buckwheat, and sunflower seeds.

“I’m not a social revolutionary. I’m not a communist. I do think that industrialism has its problems and they’re oftentimes seen at the root level of human need,” Josh says. “It’s quite scary when industrialism comes in and takes over something as essential as agriculture to all of humanity.”

The Codys have made farming possible, if not easy, but for Wayne it’s always been about keeping the property in the family. When Josh left for college, he didn’t necessarily want to come back, and didn’t think it was possible anyway. Small farms can’t support more than one family. But when Wayne and Jason asked him to move back, he threw away his career in academia and headed home.

“I’m honored to do it, that’s how I would describe it,” Josh says. “When I was growing up here, I had uncles and cousins and a brother that I just assumed would take over the farm. I never thought I would be the one who would be here.”

For access to exclusive gear videos, celebrity interviews, and more, subscribe on YouTube!

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