Love Letter from the Farm
February 2026—edition 14
Those predictions for a cold and snowy winter? Yeah…it’s been a real zinger! The storm that affected much of the nation the last week in January brought 19 inches of snow to the farm, followed by freezing and below freezing temps. It has been the severest winter here since we got livestock. The high snowbanks have made chores more than challenging, exposing some equipment and infrastructure shortcomings. Hungry hawks and desperate deer have been invading and raiding our chicken and duck yards and frozen water is an absolute buzzkill. Lessons learned this winter will certainly reshape how we plan for our next one.
But enough about us! We hope you have all been staying warm and safe. It’s February! And while we are not ones for Hallmark holidays, we are all about sending some love out into the world, so here’s a love letter of sorts.
Once upon a time, there was a thing called a mixed tape
Musical Love Notes
For those of you old enough to recall, mixed tapes had a moment. Robin and Kevin exchanged mixed tapes with their high school sweethearts and used them as procrastination devices in college. Robin had a whole collection of themed mixed tapes living under a bed at her parents’ house until she was asked to kindly remove them a few years ago. President Obama shares his favorite books, movies and music for the year on his Instagram and Robin always downloads the songs as a “mixed tape” on her streaming app and jokes about how her Boo has made her another mixed tape.
Here’s a mixed tape for you to celebrate February and the power of music. 28 songs for 28 days. Songs we’ve been listening to lately—some old favorites as well as more recent discoveries. Click on the link below and it will take you to the Qobuz link. We hope you enjoy the selections!
Playlist:
1. Reason to Believe Bruce Springsteen
2. I Am Not Afraid Charley Crockett
3. Brightest Star Lilly Hiatt
4. Cry to Me John Hiatt
5. (What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love And Understanding Elvis Costello
6. End of My Rope Pokey LaFarge
7. NUEVAYoL Bad Bunny
8. LEVII'S JEANS (feat. Post Malone) Beyoncé
9. So We Won't Forget Khruangbin
10. Set Cheikh Lô
11. Boundless Love John Prine
12. This Is Us Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris
13. Cissy Strut The Meters
14. Hold On Tom Waits
15. Harvest Moon Neil Young
16. Nobody Knows Me Lyle Lovett
17. The Lucky One (Live) Alison Krauss
18. Can't Let Go Lucinda Williams
19. That's Alright Mama Jelly Roll Kings
20. Valerie (Live At BBC Radio 1 Live Lounge) Amy Winehouse
21. My Baby Just Cares for Me Nina Simone
22. Burning Maggie Rogers
23. Motion Sickness Phoebe Bridgers
24. Dog Days Are Over Florence + The Machine
25. Corinna (From "The Natch'l Blues") Taj Mahal
26. Life Is Beautiful Keb' Mo'
27. Pink Moon Nick Drake
28. Revolution 1 The Beatles
We’re Baaaaaaaaaaack!
Our tasting room and farm store reopen for the season on Saturday, March 7th (12-3pm) with a very special launch party. As with all of our new spirit releases, we will be unveiling our Badger Flame Beet Brandy in joyous company. Join us as we emerge from our winter hibernation, dust off our disco ball, and get back into the spirit of throwing a good party for our friends and community!
Row 7 Seed Company will be showcasing their seeds as well as an exciting new (as of now top secret) product roll-out. Local legend Christina of A Pickle Story will have a lineup of jarred wonders for you to explore. And Jessica and Trina Quinn of Dacha 46 will be huffing it up from Brooklyn for the day to share their legendary borscht and a few other Eastern European Jewish treasures with us all.
Drink your Veggies
We made a beet brandy! Yes, you read that correctly. As much as we love the diversity and range of flavors that can be found in the bountiful world of fruit, Kevin has been longing to experiment with vegetables. It’s really not as weird as it sounds.
As many of you know, Hans Reisetbauer is our distillery consultant. In addition to his extraordinary fruit and grain distillates, Hans is famous for his carrot eau de vie. It is the one thing he produces that no one else does, and the one thing he told us that we couldn’t produce either. But we were intrigued by the natural sugars in vegetables and how they might be converted to alcohol and then concentrated through distillation. This is what led us to start research and development on beets.
The first experiment was: should the beets be cooked or raw? Cooking beets increases the availability and concentration of their natural sugars. More sugar means more alcohol, which translates into more volume. But would those sugars, once fermented and then distilled, have the flavor and taste that would allow the consumer to recognize it as a beet?!
The next experiment was: does a beet leach sugar when cooked in water? Would roasting preserve more sugar? Does the beet need to be peeled?
The next consideration was: which type of beet? Sugar beets are easy to come by in the Hudson Valley, but we were interested in partnering directly with a farm or seed company who is doing something innovative. This led us to Row 7 Seed Company. It was a friend who led us there.
Michelle and her Dachshund Giuseppe during their visit to the farm in 2025. Michelle currently heads up Row 7’s chef collaborations and events.
When Old Worlds Collide in New and Exciting Ways
Some of you may recall that Robin was a wine sales rep in NYC until she traded in that career for a life of washing eggs and hauling hay. In her decade with Polaner Selections, Robin called on many of the city’s top restaurant accounts and met some amazing people along the way. One such connection was made with Michelle Biscieglia, a sommelier at Daniel Boulud’s newly opened Boulud Sud at the time. Michelle then went on to become the wine director at Blue Hill New York City for many years. It was here that she formed a deep and lasting professional relationship with Chef Dan Barber. In addition to his role as Executive Chef and Co-Owner of Blue Hill New York City and Blue Hill at Stone Barns, Dan Barber is the driving force behind Row 7 Seed Company.
Back in 2019, when Row 7 was in its infancy, they hosted a seed-to-table dinner in Brooklyn and we were invited as Michelle’s guests. It was fun and it was fancy and who could have predicted that 7 years later we would be releasing a spirit made from one of the vegetables that was featured in a dish that night? But that’s the magic of the wonderfully interconnected world of wine.
Row 7 Seed Company
Row 7 is a seed-to-table company revolutionizing how we eat—and how we grow—through better-tasting vegetables. Founded by Chef Dan Barber, Row 7 works with chefs, farmers and plant breeders to co-select new varieties in the field and kitchen. You can find their certified organic seeds at row7seeds.com
Seed-to-table
A Beaut of a Beet-the Badger Flame
First launched by Row 7, this striking, flame-colored beet is the brainchild of breeder Irwin Goldman, who developed it over many years at the University of Wisconsin. In many ways, he thinks like a chef, and he is passionate about focusing people’s attention on the characteristics in vegetables that typically go unnoticed. In this case, he wanted to create a visually striking beet, one with a vibrant orange-yellow interior and cylindrical shape. But he also wanted to take on the beet’s dirty reputation—the earthy flavor that many blame for their beet aversion.
Bred to have lower levels of geosmin, the naturally occurring compound that lends beets their “earthiness”, the Badger Flame expresses more of the vegetable’s unsung sweetness. We selected it for our first foray into vegetable eaux de vie for this very reason.
Another amazing illustration by Giacomina Ferrillo. She is the incredibly talented human behind the botanical artwork on our labels.
Back to the Process
Our beet experiments led us to the makings of a process: peel the beets, cook them in water, mash them, cool them, ferment them and then distill them. Having formulated a process, it was time to scale it up. So we purchased 4,000 lbs of Badger Flame Beets from Row 7 and set about making our first vegetable eau de vie.
The idea was to work two, one-ton batches over two days. We found a used, commercial potato rumbler in Connecticut whose former life had been peeling potatoes for latkes for a Ukrainian woman’s food truck business. The rumbler could peel 20 lbs of potatoes in five minutes. With some extra time to load the rumbler, remove the peeled beets, and move them into the mash tun, this meant it would take about 9 hours to peel 2,000 lbs of beets.
Then, we heated the hot water tank to boiling and transferred the water into the mash tun to cook the beets. Some things we were able to learn from kitchen experiments, like how the sugar contents differed depending on the cooking method, but other things can only be learned in the moment. And the big question was: how to move 2,000 lbs of hot, cooked beets from the mash tun to the fermentation tank? We had to find a way to pump them, but they were too big to be pumped whole. Our hope was that the beets would be soft enough after cooking that they would be easy to mash when we turned on the mixers in the mash tun. But how much water should be left before turning on the mixers? We needed to drain enough cooking water out so that the beets would have friction between them to grind them up with the mixers, but we needed enough water remaining to make a Badger Flame slurry that could be pumped.
Once the transfer was complete, we crashed the tanks with the glycol jackets and then added yeast for fermentation. The next day we repeated the process and filled the second fermentation tank. We processed these beets in November 2024, a busy time of year for the farm store. The beet aromas were so strong that everyone who came into the store thought we had opened a borscht business.
The sugars were actually lower than we had expected, and we kept the fermentations relatively cold. Once completed, we distilled the beets twice and the yield was 130 Liters at 83.5% ABV. The resulting distillate was also curious. Color and sugar do not come through the distillation process, but pectin can, and beets contain a lot of pectin. Pectin can trap beet pigments, and this occurred. The end result was a slightly yellowish spirit with some pectin coagulation. This was something new for us.
We aged the beet in stainless steel for 14 months, proofed it to 41%, and then chill-filtered it to remove the pectin, color and proteins before bottling. There are about 6 lbs of beets in every half bottle of Badger Flame Beet Eau de Vie.
We are grateful for this collaboration with Row 7 Seed Company, and we look forward to making it again. Needless to say, it has sparked our interest in other vegetables for distillation, so who knows what might come next?
What We’ve Been Mixing Up Lately
In anticipation of our upcoming launch, we’ve been playing around with the beet. We think it could have some very interesting applications in a Bloody Mary inspired cocktail. But we wanted to start with something more classic, so here’s a Beetini, Valentine!
Beetini
2oz Branchwater Beet Brandy
1oz Branchwater Dry Vermouth
1/8oz Celery simple syrup*
Stir with ice, strain into chilled coupe, and garnish with an olive (or celery leaf)
*combine 2 coarsely chopped celery stalks (with leaves) with 3/4 cup sugar and 3/4 cup water, and place in a small saucepan. Heat over low-medium heat until sugar is dissolved but without bringing to a boil. Turn off heat and steep with celery until cooled, then strain. It will keep for up to 1 week, refrigerated.
Mary Oliver Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Looking Ahead…
Saturday, March 7th - We will reopen our farm store/tasting room for the 2026 season with a celebration of the humble beet! Join us for the launch of our first vegetable eau de vie. Beetfest will run 12-3pm. Regular store hours through the end of the year will resume Thursday-Sunday 12-5
Fridays at the Farm - Fridays at the Farm returns for the 2026 season! Join us on the Final Friday of the month for cocktails (and wine, cider, beer and nonalcoholic options), specialty food boards, farm store snacks and community! Hang out in the lower field and be entertained by our flock of ducks or pull up a seat around our fire pit or one of the many tables set up around the farm, and usher in the weekend against the calming backdrop of our farm’s natural beauty.
2026 FATF dates: Apr 24 ~ May 29 ~ Jun 26 ~ Jul 31 ~ Aug 28 ~ Sept 25 ~ Oct 30 ~