- Michael Gebert
- Eric Stiegman at Moody Tongue Brewing Co.
On Monday I wrote about Jared Rouben’s Moody Tongue Brewing Company, and Rouben’s concept of “culinary brewing,” making beers using the kind of farmers market ingredients we associate with farm-to-table restaurants more than breweries. At Rouben’s event last Saturday, I met a farmer named Eric Stiegman, whose barley and hops will go into some of Rouben’s beers.
Eric Stiegman: Our farm’s a 700-acre corn and soybean farm, it’s a family farm. I’d gotten kind of restless with corn and soybeans, and I tried grapes—I have about an acre of grapes. It’s a lot of maintenance and pruning—I still have it, but I haven’t paid as much attention to it as I should since I’ve gotten into the malting part of it.
Yeah, well, anybody that wants to make beer on their own place has got to have some hops. I’ve actually got four or five different varieties now. 15 years ago, when I first tried, I ordered some Hallertaus, probably American—I don’t know how to tell the difference [from German hops], they made some pretty good Kolsch. They seem to survive in Illinois all right, they don’t grow as well as some other varieties but if you want to make some German styles of beer, it’s pretty important to have their style of hops.
It seems like brewers aren’t that open to [local grain] because a lot of them are selling whatever they can make. Why should I add any expense or hassle to it when everything I make sells? That seems to be kind of what I ran into. It’s such a growing industry and they were like, that’s nice, but . . . we’re selling everything we make, what’s the point of having something different? I can’t blame them in a way because they work a lot of long hours, but I kind of saw this as something that was in the future that was going to come down, and Jared felt the same way. And I thought, well, I found somebody who thinks this is a good idea.
