Albany Business Review: Cidery and Brewery Planned In Altamont

 

 

 

Wednesday, December 3, 2014, 7:14am EST

Cidery and brewery planned in Altamont

Megan Rogers

Albany Business Review

 

Barley and hops for craft beer are being harvested alongside the apples growing at Indian Ladder Farm, as a cidery and brewery takes root at the farm in Altamont, New York.

Indian Ladder Farmstead Brewery and Cidery is not yet licensed to produce and sell alcohol. The company is working with craft breweries, including the brewery based at Albany Pump Station, to bring the ingredients grown at Indian Ladder Farm into restaurants and bars.

Dietrich Gehring, one of the owners of Indian Ladder Farmstead Brewery and Cidery, planted five acres of barley about four years ago and added an acre of hops after one year. Gehring is in the midst of the state and federal licensing process to produce and sell hard cider and beer. He expects to get those licenses by March 2015. In the meantime, he is working with other brewing companies to get his ingredients into customer's hands.

"After a large learning curve of learning to grow hops and barely, we were able to get ingredients to a couple of breweries and have them make some beer not under our name, but using our ingredients," Gehring says.

C.H. Evans Brewing Company, at Albany Pump Station, is brewing a beer using 500 pounds of malted barley and 25 pounds of hops from Indian Ladder Farmstead Brewery and Cidery. That amount of hops and barley will yield about 30 kegs of beer, Gehring says.

He is also working with Other Half Brewing Company in Brooklyn.

Indian Ladder Farmstead Brewery and Cidery is owned by Gehring, Laura Ten Eyck and Stuart Williams. The brewery and cidery operates at the Indian Ladder Farms, but is a separate entity from the apple orchard and farm. Ten Eyck's family owns the farm. The team behind Indian Ladder Farmstead Brewery and Cidery invested about $100,000 to lease space and purchase equipment.
Craft beer, cider and spirits are growing in popularity. The number of breweries, cideries and wineries in New York state has doubled over the past three years. A few local examples from 2014: Alejandro del Peral opened Nine Pin Cider, a craft cidery and tasting room, in the Albany warehouse district; the Rare Form Brewing Company opened in downtown Troy; and Saratoga Courage Distillery started distributing its vodka with DeCrescente Distributing Co.

Nationally, production of local beer was up 18 percent in the first half of 2014.

Gehring says the impetus to start the cidery and brewery came after New York state passed a farm brewery law in 2012 that encouraged brewers who use New York state ingredients to receive a tax credit.

"We just thought what we would do was have a niche here in that everything would come off of this farm," he says.

Read more at:
http://m.bizjournals.com/albany/morning_call/2014/12/cidery-and-brewery-planned-in-altamont.html?page=all&r=full