Beer

Crafting Holiday Cheer at Tilted Barn Brewery

An Exeter micro-brewery gives new meaning to the phrase “drink local”

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How local is your beer? While locally brewed beer has become an increasingly common presence in our bars and liquor stores, most of it is made from ingredients sourced elsewhere. The beer coming out of Tilted Barn Brewery, on the other hand, is about as local as it gets: it’s literally brewed in a barn on a farm in Exeter using hops that are grown just a few hundred yards away. “Almost every beer we’re going to do is going to have some aspect of the farm in it,” says brewer and founder Matt Richardson. That means this fall’s pumpkin ale is made with homegrown pumpkins. Perhaps the most unique example will come in the spring, when Richardson will brew a spruce tip pale ale using fresh cuttings from the farm’s Christmas tree fields.

The brewery was the next logical step for Richardson and his wife Kara. They bought the property from Kara’s family, and continued to operate it as a Christmas tree farm. Around 2007, Matt, a hobbyist brewer, was prompted by a worldwide hops shortage to start growing his own. Along with his brother-in-law Joel, he eventually began selling them commercially under the name Ocean State Hops. Local operations like Newport Storm and Pawtucket’s Bucket Brewery became his customers.

With the launch of Tilted Barn, Richardson will now be keeping all those hops for himself… well, not quite. He’s excited to use the family farm – where visitors are welcomed by his delightfully friendly dogs Summit and Tupelo, and perhaps even offered a guided tour by his three-year-old daughter Violet – to share his love of hops with beer enthusiasts through weekly tastings. “Most people don’t even know what hops look like,” he enthuses. “It’s exciting to not just sell people beer, but educate them a little bit.” As we head into the holiday season, a Christmas tree and a growler of pumpkin ale sounds like the perfect kind of one-stop shopping.

Tilted Barn Brewery
1 Helmsley Place, Exeter

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