S.D.'s first field-to-glass brewery just a 'hop' away
By:
Jamie Hult, Staff writer
Fourth-generation farmer Lee Anderson and his wife, Janelle Johnson, grow their own hops for a variety of beers at A Homestead Brew in Valley Springs. Jamie Hult/BV Journal
Jamie Hult
Staff writer
When you order a beer at A Homestead Brew, you know exactly what you’re getting and where it came from.
Just look out the window.
The farmhouse-style tap room overlooks the hops fields that produced Homestead’s unique brews – five varieties that fourth-generation farmer Lee Anderson and his wife, Janelle (Nelleigh) Johnson, planted, picked and produced on site at South Dakota’s first field-to-glass brewery.
Drive down a gravel road in Valley Springs to the Anderson hops farm – six acres on which great-great-grandfather Martin homesteaded in 1882.
Lee Anderson, the great-great-grandson and brew guru behind Homestead, is pretty proud of that. With old photos on the walls and wood from the original homestead forming the roof and tabletops, the family history is all right there to see.
“Know your farmer, know where your stuff comes from,” Anderson said. “We have different beers where I could take you to specific plants and you could drink it today. It’s more than just getting a beer in your hand. It’s, ‘Hey, we can drink this plant.’”
Five varieties of floral, citrusy and earthy plants allow for a lot of different brewing styles, and Anderson likens A Homestead Brew to a European-style farmhouse with a rotating menu of Belgians, dunkles, ales and seasonal beers.
But what he’s most proud of, perhaps, is crafting sour beers – “an old-world style of brewing, but fairly new to Americans,” he noted.
Among the 10 beers on tap is the Farmhouse Sour, Homestead’s house variety, which Brandon Lane described as “amazing.”
“For people who might not be craft drinkers, like myself, they have pretty much a little bit of everything,” he said. “Now I’m spoiled.”
He said the mulberry sour is pretty tasty, too, with a cream soda and vanilla twist at the end that makes you want more.
Getting those mulberries was a process in and of itself. Anderson and Johnson spent a month climbing up and shaking their neighbors’ trees to get the 250 pounds of fruit to produce the seasonal batch, which Johnson aptly named “Love Thy Neighbor.”
And perfecting the sour took about a year and a half of research, trial and error, Anderson said.
“I hope it’s something our kids are doing someday, high-fiving and saying, ‘Yeah, remember the day we made that?’”
He and Johnson – who have three boys – began planting hops on the family farm in 2012.
“There was a hops shortage nationally,” Anderson recalled. “I have a culinary degree, and my brother Josh was going to school for microbiology. It’s something we talked about doing together – how do we continue the family tradition of farming on this land?”
Growing hops was Josh’s idea, said their mom, Nancy Kreulen.
Both have stayed involved since that first crop chip, but “Lee and Nelleigh keep up the passion,” Kreulen said.
“They’re the farmers, the marketers, the brewers, the laborers, the promoters,” she said. “Together, they do it all.”
The marketing and promoting part got a big boost in April when A Homestead Brew began selling commercially. Their brews are on tap at Monks, Bros Brassiere, Falls Landing and the Bonus Round in Sioux Falls, with bottled versions at several Hy-Vee stores.
They’ve even crafted a few limited-edition brews – Amber Waves, Sioux Falls Skyforce’s beer of the year, and the Pheasantennial Lager for Pheasants Forever, celebrating 100 years of pheasant-hunting in South Dakota.
The tap room opened in June, making Homestead the state’s first field-to-glass brewery and one of only 100 farmhouse breweries in the country.
“It took years of work to get into this room,” Anderson said.
Barn wood from his great-great-grandfather’s homestead roots the modern décor in tradition, and large picture windows looking out onto the fields offers the ultimate “Made in the U.S.A.” experience (another point on which Anderson is pretty proud – check the manufacturers’ labels on all the equipment).
Recently the couple recently put up the brewery sign, and now people who used to drive by slowly and crane their necks are stopping and asking for tours.
At this, Anderson is right at home – demonstrating the pelletizing and the kegging, letting you crumble a cascade or chinook in your hands before breathing in the aroma and explaining anything you want to know about the brewing process, from field to glass.
“He still hand-stirs stuff. It’s amazing. The guy is so passionate,” Lane said.
From Brandon, Homestead is a 10-minute drive away to experience something unlike anything else in the area.
“To get away and sit down in an atmosphere like that – to have the aromas and the ambience – is going to be beautiful in the summer, with this amazing patio area just surrounded by hops,” Lane said. “You can out there, pick your own hops, make your own brew for your party for the evening – you really don’t have that experience around here. You don’t.”
And as the family enters their sixth year of hops farming and first winter for Homestead’s tap room, Anderson is already thinking about what’s next – dinner.
“It’s why we started the field-to-glass experience,” he said. “From there we go to field-to-plate. I want to put really extravagant plates in front of people.”
Zoned as agricultural tourism, A Homestead Brew aims to become a landmark and destination worth knowing and talking about. In addition to weddings, corporate events and opportunities to brew with them, Homestead holds free fun for the public. Follow the Valley Springs brewery on Facebook for upcoming events like snow sculpting, rail jam snowboarding and skiing and “capture the keg” paintball. For more information, email lee@ahomesteadbrew.com.
Winter tap room hours: Saturdays 2 p.m. to close
Tours: Monday-Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Located: 26677 486th Ave., Valley Springs
From Brandon: Take SD-11 S. (4 mi.), E. on 266th St. (5 mi.), S. on 486th Ave.
