Shuan Hill, May 20th 2011:
Been extremely busy filling barrels… and brewing as much beer as possible. When we started this brewery, we brewed 2 batches a week. No we are brewing 4.
By the end of next week we’ll have 40+ oak wine/port/bourbon barrels filled with SpontaneousFermentation, Oud Bruin and Buckwheat Rye Imperial Porter (both brewed withWill Meyers of Cambridge Brewing Company), Flanders Red, Flora(buckwheat/spelt barrel fermented Florence Saison), Art (wine barrelfermented Arthur Saison), Ann (Sauvignon Blanc barrel aged Honey Saison),Mimosa (Sauvignon Blanc barrel aged Orange Saison… primary fermented withB.Clausenii and tangello/tangerine juice and zest), Damon (Russian ImperialStout aged Blanton’s Bourbon Barrels), Genealogy of Morals (Rye CoffeeImperial Stout aging in Madeira barrels) and – Birth of Tragedy (ImperialPorter brewed with Coffee, Cinnamon, and Honey – aged in Bourbon barrels andconditioned on Madagascar and Papa New Guinea vanilla beans). Nearly all ofthese beers will be released around the winter holidays. All of theintentionally “sour” barrels have been inoculated with nothing other thanour own house spontaneous cultures from our winter cool-ship projects.Thus, we are crafting a truly indigenous/chthonic flavor profile, uniqueonly to our brewery and Greensboro, VT.
I stumbled upon this blog post as I’m a knowledge junkie and spend my lunch breaks looking up random things and taking extensive notes. It’s what I do quite often. Looking at HFS’s Upcoming Bottle Releases, you’ll see some familiar beers such as the Spontaneous Fermentation, Genealogy of Morals and some beers previously released like Damon, Mimosa and Art.
Last weekend, I took an embarrassing amount of time (6 hours) reading blog posts from the Hill Farmstead Blog. I started at page 1.
I am a HUGE fan of both brevity and story telling. My mentor Dom cultivated my fascinations of how the world looks through the eyes of others and I fell in love with Thoreau and Mark Twain. The first posts from Shaun read like this. They are a transparent look at what an entrepreneur feels to follow their dreams. Everything is in their head but to take dreams and make them a reality is both beautiful as it is scary. It’s a very inspiring blog if you start at the beginning. Grab your laptop and check it out this weekend.
Shaun’s writing style is succinct. As you can see above, his formatting lacks bullets and it’s very similar to how letters from my father arrive in my virtual and physical mailbox. Some men have little time for encapsulating a thought so they jot notes down in a moleskine and, although hard to interpret, they are full of great and inspiring ideas.
This is not an ass kissing session. I’ve just been around enough smart entrepreneurs to recognize the style easily. Shaun has this style so either he’s really busy or his mind is working too fast to format things like an MBA student would. I will assume both.
I hope bringing these blog posts to life won’t cause Shaun to take down these early posts. They’re incredibly candid and inspiring. Also, want to know what’s next from Shaun? Check out his blog. There are a lot of fun hints of upcoming beer releases and it’s a blog that I wish Shaun still maintained more regularly. Blogs are more powerful and more of a time capsule than a Facebook page. More brewers should use them. No, more dreamers should use them.