Homegrown, Village-Scale Beer
The story around this brewery is not typical. Chimacum Valley Grainery and Brewery approaches beer from a different angle; it looks at beer from the soil up. The brewery is part of a farm and a grainery in Washington’s Chimacum Valley. It grows and malts its own barley, which is exceedingly rare. Chimacum Valley Brewery has been brewing for awhile now, with limited availability and no retail outlet of its own, but the beers are now available in cans at select locations in the Chimacum/Port Townsend area. More about that below. (Images from Instagram and chimacumgrain.com.)
Chimacum Valley Grainery and Brewery describes itself as a micro-farm-brewery operation, making beer from the ground up. The intention is to offer people an opportunity to taste beers produced from organically grown grains in an integrated, farm-grounded brewing model: “soil sustained, land-based, handled by a few sets of hands—beer at village-scale.”
From the Ground to the Glass
Typically, the barley used to make the beer you drink is grown on expansive farms in places like Idaho, Montana, and Alberta. Trainloads and truckloads of grain are shipped to facilities where it is malted on a large scale before it is moved into the distribution network that eventually provides malted barley to the brewing industry. Some breweries even use malted barley imported from Europe. All of this is business as usual in the brewery biz.
Chimacum Valley Brewery is doing something different. It grows the grain, harvests the barley, and then employs a technique known as floor malting which is a manual, labor-intensive technique that was common before the industrial revolution. Planting, cultivating, harvesting, malting, brewing. It’s a farm-based process. Even some of the hops come from the same land.
“Big step over here for our very small, very localized brewing project,” said a recent post on social media that announced the availability of the brewery’s beer in cans. “We grow this beer! Using our organically grown Chimacum Valley barley, we then floor malt it in our barn by hand turning, and then brew it across the courtyard from the bakery and the stone mills. A continued quest to diversify our organic grain crops, our processing capacity and the goods we can offer our regional community that are grown and made at village-scale.”
“In many ways, it’s really hard to stay small scaled. We’re producing too little beer to attract a distributor and we’re too small to have a sales team, so we’re hoping our community will help us get the word out and give it a try!”
Get It
Follow Chimacum Valley Grainery and Brewery on Instagram. Look for the beer in cans at the following locations:
Pourhouse (Port Townsend)
Chums A Shop by the Sea (Port Townsend)
Nordland General Store (Marrowstone Island)
Bishop Block Bottle Shop & Garden (Port Townsend)
Chimacum Corner Farmstand (Chimacum)
To learn about other recent beer releases, visit our New Beer Releases page.
