EP-095 Shaun Hill of Hill Farmstead

For long-time readers of the GBH site, you may recall the article I wrote about Hill Farmstead back in January 2014. For GBH, and myself as a beer writer, it was a bit of a turning point. That article remains our most-read brewery profile ever - and now that it has two years running on it, I doubt that will ever change. The reach it’s created for GBH opened a lot of doors for me and the team, as it was shortly after that the I first began brining other writers into the fold under the banner of GBH. And the entire reason many of those writers sought me out, was because of that article. It changed something for them. It gave them a reason to think about beer writing very very differently — their words not mine. But I can attest that even for me, it changed things. I’ve written about many many breweries over the years, almost a decade now. And most breweries have a sense of place and personality. But until that visit to Hill Farmstead, no brewery I’d visited had THAT sense of place. Or THAT kind of personality. Indeed, it took me almost a year to gather my feelings on the subject, and share that story with my readers. It’s a bit ironic for me that so much of my thesis was focused on the story beyond the hype for Hill Farmstead at the time. Don’t get me wrong, his reputation was warranted and the beautiful setting of the place certainly told an accurate story. But it was ironic because my experience actually made me value Hill Farmstead even more, but for very different reasons. I was attracted to the focus of Shaun Hill, the simple but expressive beers being made at a time when there was no real vocabulary for a mixed ferm saison in our typical craft parlance. The beers harkened back to my first and enduring loves, like Saison Dupont, for which I’d not found anything comparable in the states. And something about the place reminded me so much of upbringing I had in rural Pennsylvania. The terrain, the isolation, the struggle to produce something valuable so far away from where those things are typically valued. After reading the article himself, Shaun admitted to not remembering my visit much that day. In fact, he reluctantly gave me about ten minutes of his time and went back to work. And most of the piece came not from the things that Shaun said, but the things that he did. I witnessed not just the beauty and rare quality of it, but the work, frustration, and anxiety of it all — and it stuck with me. It was mostly a portrait built on observation, and a bit of self-reflection for my own life experience. That article tied Shaun and I together. Years later, and we’ve become friend of a sort. I’ve gone back to visit a couple times a year, like many of you have. And I’ve been lucky enough to steal away some time on each of those trips to listen and learn from his experiences up on that hill in Greensboro, Vermont. Some of it has been trying, and frustrating. And some of it has been revelatory and edifying. That’s just a way of living in that part of the world. This weekend, he was in town for our friend Ryan Burk’s wedding in Chicago. Ryan is the cider maker at Angry Orchard’s Walden project. You may have listened to his interview two weeks ago. You’ll find a lot of parallels here in my conversation with Shaun, the three of us learn a lot from each other these days, but of course, so much of it will be unique to his experience as the creator of Hill Farmstead — which to my mind is still one of the most singular things in the world.