Virginia’s craft beer scene extends quite a ways outside of the Richmond area, and if you head northwest up into the Blue Ridge Mountains, you’ll find a good bit going on.
Virginia’s craft beer scene extends quite a ways outside of the Richmond area, and if you head northwest up into the Blue Ridge Mountains, you’ll find a good bit going on.
Wild Wolf Brewing Company is in a tiny Nelson County town called Nellysford, but it’s at the center of the Brew Ridge Trail, a line of half a dozen or so craft breweries running up Rt. 151 from Arrington to Charlottesville. RVA’s own John Reinhold and Ronnie Lopez took a trip into the countryside to speak to owner Mary Wolf and find out what exactly is going on out there in the wilds of western VA.
Can you tell me a little bit about when Wild Wolf got started, and how did it come about?
It started with my son, Dan, who is the brewmaster. He got out of brewing school in 2008–he went to Cedar Woods Institute of Technology–and of course, you know what was going on with the economy at that time. He was having trouble finding a job as a brewer, so I got involved, just trying to help him figure out ways to make a job. It was like, “Well, I’ll learn about the brewing industry and maybe we’ll do something small.” But what happened is that I fell in love with the craft beer industry. It was just like, this is so interesting and incredible and I felt like it really was going to take off. So… here we are. We started down the road for a year in a homebrew shop, and did that knowing we were moving here. [We] spent that time building here and getting this up and running. In November we’ll [have been] open for 3 years.
A female-owned brewery… that’s pretty awesome.
Yeah, not very many of them. New Belgium is one.
What was the original brew you guys looked into doing?
I know that one of Dan’s early inspirations was Starr Hill, and he always admired Mark Thompson. And I know they did an American pale ale that he really liked, so I know that Alpha Ale was one of our early ones. And it steadily got hoppier as customers wanted more hops.
Yeah, there was kind of a hop run, wasn’t there? Still is.
Yeah, still is. I think people are looking for more balance in their beer now, but that one is definitely hoppy for an IPA.
Where did the name Wild Wolf come from?
Well, with our last name being Wolf, we definitely wanted Wolf in it. So we looked at great names with Wolf, and that’s where we ended up.
How did you pick this spot? Did you live in the area?
We lived in the area, and one of the things that was really important to us was to be on the Brew Ridge Trail. We actually have an organization that we formed around that–it’s not intuitive, [but] it seemed like a great location. Blue Mountain is at the beginning of 151; Devil’s Backbone at that point was fairly new, but they’re about 6 miles [away]. There’s a lot of tourism here. It’s not like you’re in the middle of the city–it would’ve been easier to do something in Richmond. But we’re glad we’re here; it’s a great place.
Tell me a little bit about your brew system, especially when it comes to the water and the hops–some of the things that make Wild Wolf unique.
Our brew house is a 15 barrel premier system. Lots of people in the country have those, so that’s not so unique. The amount of production for our restaurant is huge; when we give tours, we try to explain to people that what you see here is not a normal restaurant brewery. We aren’t trying to be a production brewery; we’re kind of on the scale of a very small one, but we’re actually a restaurant brewpub.
One of the things that’s special about this road, just because we’re in the mountains, we have amazing water. We [had] the water tested and the water here is almost perfect. From a brewery’s standpoint, that’s a dream, because then they can make any beer style they want. It’s hard to take things out of the water. It’s awesome when the water doesn’t have anything in it that needs to be removed, and you can add whatever salts and chemistry you want to get the style that you want. So that’s certainly pretty special.
From the standpoint of the hops, we used fresh hops from this year’s harvest in our new Primal Instinct [IPA]. We dried the rest of that and put some in each batch of Primal that we made, so the hops, for the amount of time and money we spent on them, are certainly more for the experience. We think it adds to the experience of coming here. [Visitors] can go to the hop yard and see the chickens and walk around. It speaks to who we are as a company, that we’re one with the land as much as possible and the hops are just one more piece of our property.
It’s a very nice property. It has a rich history–can you tell us about that?
The main building is the original schoolhouse for the county. It was used between 1910 and 1939. So it has an interesting history to it. When we were building and adding a brand new steel building to a 105 year old building, we had to give it sort of a rustic façade so that it fit in. We even gave the bar a rustic look, so that it didn’t look like you were going from an old building to a shiny new one. So it’s definitely different when you walk from the bar to the brewery.
We have a couple seasonal beers in front of us. The Howling Pumpkin is your newest?
The Pumpkin and Primal are both brand new beers.
The pumpkin’s the thing everyone talks about in Richmond, about how pumpkin gets introduced so quickly into the market. It kind of hits in August–
It’s ridiculous.
What I like about your pumpkin is that its not destroying me with pumpkin, it’s got a nice balance.
It’s got a lot of pumpkin in it, but I think the spice blend is great. Our very first pumpkin that we made was when we were on the barrel and half-nano system and we literally hand-cut and roasted 800 pounds of pumpkin. We quickly realized that was not going to happen on the 15-barrel system, so now we used a lot of canned pumpkin.
What’s your most popular beer?
Blonde Hunny all day long. It’s our flagship beer. It’s interesting, because when you start, you don’t know what’s gonna ring with people. In fact, Blonde Hunny has a funny story. When we first named it, we were throwing different names around. I’m sure you’ve seen the icon for it, which is this great looking pinup girl–we were like, “Oh, Blonde Hunny. That’s kind of funny.” And I’m thinking, “When we move from our shop we’re going to have to actually give it a real name, because no guy is going to sit at a bar and drink Blonde Hunny.” How wrong was I? I see these big mountain burly guys drinking it–they don’t care. I think the icon helps too; it’s not bothering anybody from what I can tell. It’s a great looking can–a great icon. Men like it, women like it, it’s a great beer. It’s kind of a gateway beer; it’s easy to drink, and yet people that are strong beer drinkers love it too. It’s not hoppy, it’s easy to drink. It’s just 7% alcohol.
It sneaks up on ya.
Drink with caution.
So what others things are you looking to do? Not just beer but expansion–what are you looking to get into?
This building that’s being converted into an events hall is our next big problem; that’s the next six months. We do events now, but that’ll be much larger scale. We’ve just done Lockn, which was our first time doing an external festival with our food. [That] was really cool. We’re looking at some different options as far as beer and brewing. We’re kind of out of room in the brewery, and so we’re figuring out the next step. There are a lot of different options right now.
What goes into making a new brew? Is it something where your son sits down and says I have an idea? Does he come to you with it? How does that work?
It’s evolved. When we first started, he would get an idea or an inspiration, and he would be like, “Huh. What can I do with this?” Which is kind of how Blonde Hunny started up. The Primal Instinct would be a good example–we never wanted to do an IPA, because everyone else has one and we’ve worked really hard to not do what other people do. But truth be told, all of our distributors pretty much demanded an IPA, so we were like, “OK, we’re going to come up with something that people love.”
At different events, we probably tried about 100 different IPAs, and three or four of us who have the best palettes decided, “This is what’s most popular, and we think this is why.” We just went for what we think is gonna be a great beer, and for us, something people will love. I think it’s got a great malt balance. It’s obviously very hoppy, but really balanced. The unique thing that we were able to do with it is [put] hops from our own hop yard in it. So that was our own little touch; most people can’t do that, because not everyone has their own hop yard.
We also wanted to talk about the drainage fields you mentioned.
Well, obviously we’re rural, and so we don’t have city water and city sewers. So it’s by necessity that we do that. That great well water that is so perfect? The flip side is [that] the drain field is very expensive. You can’t just put [in] a couple of tanks and a couple of lines like a house. In a system like this, we have a lot of water, so the engineer that originally designed it put in an anaerobic and an aerobic digester. It’s definitely a process to get those balanced. We have to maintain the perfect PH and perfect aqualinity or they don’t work properly. Getting that to happen is a challenge, but it’s pretty interesting. We’re in the process of expanding our system and figuring out, do we want more of those? What works best? What do the engineers recommend? It’s a pretty complicated system.
That’s a big part of what makes this place so eco-friendly, though.
When we first decided to package, we made a conscious decision to go with only 22 ounce bottles, which is only for seasonals, and decorate them really prettily, so we hope people don’t throw them away. I know they do, but not as much. But when we decided to go into the mass production, we did it with cans, and we did that specifically because we live in a county where they don’t even recycle glass. That’s just part of our culture as a company–we’re really into the environment. We do composting from the kitchen, and we have the chicken and the hops. The drain field is pretty state of the art, and it’s about to become more state of the art within the next two years. We have things like wetlands as part of the drain field; the water goes through and is filtered. It’s pretty intricate.
This article is taken from the latest print issue of RVA Magazine, out now. To read a digital version of the full issue, click here.
