Degrees of Intent — Fox Farm Brewery in Salem, Connecticut

There’s a blink-and-you-miss-it element of driving to Fox Farm Brewery. Coming from the east, Music Vale Road descends gently for about a quarter mile before easing right then banking sharply to the left, continuing westward. Steal a glance at a cell phone, adjust the radio, or daydream for just a second and Fox Farm, as quickly as it appears on the right, disappears. Though the sightlines have been cleared dramatically since the brewery’s opening in 2017, the entrance still possesses some abiding elusiveness. 

Dressed in a worn, gray T-shirt with the brewery’s name across the front, Fox Farm’s founder and brewer Zack Adams exits the glass double doors right as I pull in. When he greets me, and asks about my drive, it feels like Adams is welcoming me into his home rather than his business.

In a way, he is. The 30-acre southeastern Connecticut property is not only the location of a brewery campus—which includes a tasting room, 15-barrel brewing system (complete with horizontal lagering tanks and a coolship), and a stone-facade building in which the barrel-aged beer resides—but his actual home, which rests slightly uphill behind the brewery.

It didn’t always look like this. Back in the day, when Zack and his then-girlfriend, now-wife Laura were high schoolers together at nearby East Lyme High School, the old property was something of a notorious Salem landmark. Previously, it was owned by the Fox family (which gives the brewery its name), and had gone through a number of iterations, from dairy farm to pet project of an eccentric New York City doctor to a state of overgrown disrepair. Salem’s most recognizable name, Rachel Robinson, the widow of baseball legend Jackie Robinson, even formerly held the deed to the property.  

“If you didn’t crane your neck at the right moment as you were rounding the corner, you wouldn’t even know this place was here,” Adams says, looking over his land. “We would hear stories from friends that would kind of sneak here and climb up the silo and rappel down the side and stuff. It was just kind of this cool little landmark in town.”

In 2017, the “cool little landmark” turned into a brewery. Positive buzz on beer message boards and local word-of-mouth spread the gossip about a new spot in the small bedroom community. It wasn’t just churning out high-end IPAs, but brought an obsessive focus to traditional styles like English Ales, Czech and German Lagers, and mixed-fermentation farmhouse beers as well. 

“It’s an ingrained personality trait,” Adams says of his focus on tradition. “I just had the sense, and still do to this day, like nail the basics. You can actually spend your whole life trying to nail the basics. That’s what the best brewing cultures do.”

Adams is careful with his words and, well, with everything else. As easy as it is to sit outside the barn sipping a Grodziskie, Fox Farm’s take on the smoked Polish wheat beer made in collaboration with Austin, Texas’ Live Oak Brewing Company, it’s easy to imagine another scenario in which this place doesn’t exist at all. Given Adams’ contemplative and cautious disposition, it took a series of blatant—and not so blatant—signs to bring Fox Farm into being. 

‘LIGHTNING DIDN’T STRIKE TWICE, BUT CLOSE ENOUGH’

In the United States, beer culture doesn’t have a lot of overlap with wine. Craft beer revolution aside, 750ml bottles of Saison or magnums of Table Beer generally haven’t replaced the bottle (or bottles) of Pinot Noir or Chardonnay at most dining room tables. When Adams takes his seat at his in-laws’ table for Sunday dinners, there has always been wine. However, there has always been homemade wine, as is the tradition in many Italian families across New England. 

“At our family dinners every week, we usually have homemade wine on the dinner table, and whether it is a bad batch or a good batch, we know where it came from,” Laura says. She grew up making wine, she says, just as her father had. The product mattered less than the process. It was about tradition. It was about making memories.

“I love their table wine,” Adams says. “It’s what I crave with my pasta.”

Adams’ in-laws used grapes from their own farm to make their homemade wine, so it was with this spirit in mind that they gifted Adams, after he graduated from Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts and was coming into his own as a beer drinker, a homebrew kit.

“Lightning didn’t quite strike twice, but it was close enough. You know, friends that are telling you your beer is good, you gotta take that with a giant grain of salt, but [winning] was, you know, some affirmation from elsewhere.”

“That summer, I just dove in and never stopped,” he says. “[I] just went nuts.”

In 2009, the Great Recession hamstrung the job market across the United States, which made entering the workforce a tricky proposition for a new graduate. Armed with a degree in economics and entrepreneurship, Adams ultimately found himself working in bankruptcy finance. “[It was] unwinding companies that had failed,” he explains. “Business was very good for [the company] when it was very bad for everyone else.” Later, after shifting gears to an online marketing gig, Adams ramped up his homebrewing in the basement of a two-family home owned by Laura’s sister and her husband.

“We were living in a second-floor apartment in this old house,” he remembers as he takes a swig of his smoked beer. “And so I didn’t have a real practical place to brew. When I made the jump to all-grain brewing, it was housed in the basement. The deal was that I’ll get the equipment, I’ll set it up. I’ll manage it. We can work together on beers and you get to share in everything. It was a nice arrangement that worked out really well for us. Every weekend as much as possible we would be out here in Salem in a basement down the road.”

At the time, Adams focused on traditional beers, calling English styles “an early obsession,” but chose to brew a contemporary Double IPA for the Longshot American Homebrew Contest, hosted annually since 1996 by Boston Beer Company. In 2012, Adams’ entry won.

“It had the coolest prize,” Adams says. “They brew your beer on a massive scale and all your friends can buy it and they give you five grand. They fly you to the Great American Beer Festival. It was really cool. It’s a very cool reward.” 

Fast forward five years, and that propitious start served as a confidence- and credibility-booster. Banks were more willing to give loans to burgeoning brewers at the time, and a national award eased concerns about experience and quality. Adams would enter the contest again in a subsequent year with his take on a Pale Ale. His entry reached the final round, but didn’t earn the top prize.

“Lightning didn’t quite strike twice, but it was close enough,” he says. “You know, friends that are telling you your beer is good, you gotta take that with a giant grain of salt, but [winning] was, you know, some affirmation from elsewhere.”

AS LUCK WOULD HAVE IT

“If it didn’t start here, it probably wouldn’t have happened anywhere,” Adams says. 

We’re inside the tasting room, whose walls are adorned with wooden wall signs listing the names of the beers, all of which were made by Laura. The tap handles were upcycled from the ends of shovels, also Laura’s doing, remnants of the previous farm owners’ hoarding. Like the beer, every inch of this barn—from the beams to the bar to the coolship room upstairs—seems intentional. As Adams shows me around, we split a beer named Susurrus, a mixed-fermentation Farmhouse Ale brewed with sumac, yarrow, boysenberries, and blueberries.

In 2013, Adams and Laura, who was teaching at the time, decided to move back to Salem from nearby Chester. In their search for what Adams called a “starter home,” they noticed the farm in a state of slow decay, overgrown with weeds and poison ivy. As luck would have it, the owner was caught up in a lengthy probate process.

“We reached out to ask at what must have been the perfect time,” Adams says. “After years of legal sorting they were weeks away from being able to sell and we made an offer before it hit the market.”

“It was such an exciting time to be creating something together, while at the same time we were just starting out and growing as a family,” says Laura, who adds that her principal role at Fox Farm now is tasks that can be accomplished “with kids in tow.” The Adams have three children, aged seven, five, and one. According to Laura, the seven-year-old is the expert box folder, while the five-year-old helps out with the cleaning.

“You couldn’t see much due to the overgrowth, and there was poison ivy creeping up the silo. Luckily, helping hands are easy to find when you have good beer to go around, and we are forever grateful to our family and friends for stepping up during that initial phase of clearing out the barn to reveal the blank slate. It was a tiring, rewarding process.”

In 2015, the couple, then with an 18-month-old child, took $1,000 out of savings to hire a structural engineer to examine the site and see if it was sound enough to support a brewery. The report recommended some slight changes, but overall the property was in surprisingly good shape.

“At that point, we were committed,” Adams says. “We had spent a thousand dollars on this. We can’t turn back now. [It was] a tough stone to stop from moving. But sometimes that’s what you need. Like I said, friends and stuff, they taste all your homebrews and say you should start a brewery. But it took this big leap to actually getting things going.”

But the property needed a facelift. 

“You couldn’t see much due to the overgrowth, and there was poison ivy creeping up the silo,” Laura says. “Luckily, helping hands are easy to find when you have good beer to go around, and we are forever grateful to our family and friends for stepping up during that initial phase of clearing out the barn to reveal the blank slate. It was a tiring, rewarding process.”

‘HOME RIGHT AWAY’

The first person to join Laura and Adams on what he calls “this trip” was his older brother Dave. Separated by just 11 months, the Adams brothers shared friends throughout high school and, according to the younger Adams, “got all their fighting out when they were younger.” Dave, too, knew how important the site was to what Fox Farm was going to mean. “The spot was the biggest thing,” he says. “It was home right away. It was really striking how perfect it would be in this Fox Farm story.” 

For his part, Adams calls hiring his older brother an “easy decision.” 

“When Zack took the leap into the brewery, I told him that I would do whatever it took so that he can stay wholly focused on making the best beer he can,” Dave tells me. “I didn’t know what that would look like.” 

Dave soon proved himself to be an adept general manager. He runs the hospitality side of the business, managing accounts and the front-of-house staff. He tells me his aim is to make sure the customer experience is as positive as possible. “Almost everyone has had an interaction with Dave,” says Adams. “He makes them feel valued and appreciated.”

This is not only a philosophy with the beer drinkers who live locally or navigate New England byways to come try Fox Farm beers—this is true of the staff as well. The Adams brothers have crafted a culture at Fox Farm that extends beyond the beer.

Em Sauter, who is an Advanced Cicerone and the creator of a beloved beer education comic called “Pints and Panels,” works one day a week in the tasting room at Fox Farm. After an initial visit alongside a friend, she’d sent Adams a note thanking him for his hospitality. In turn, he offered her a job.

“Everyone in the tasting room is family,” she says. “I can’t say nicer things. I say too many nice things. [Zack is] the nicest person I have ever met. The Adams family are just good, honest people. It’s a joy to work there.” She jokes that Dave often has to be physically moved out of the way while chatting with a customer, so that she and her colleagues can continue to pour beer for other visitors.

“The beer is so good,” Sauter says. “They’re doing everything so well and so right. I remember right away being blown away by the talent and how good the beer is.”

STAYING POWER

The first beer Adams brewed commercially was Gather, a German Pilsner and the closest thing to a flagship beer Fox Farm has. It was an unconventional move, to start with a European Lager when Adams has since proven himself capable of brewing sought-after hop-forward beers, but it was a statement of intent. Since then, the brewery has dabbled in all manner of traditional styles, from Kölsch to Altbier to English Bitter. To honor tradition, there’s a side-pull faucet to pour Czech Lagers in the appropriate manner.

“We’re trying to build something with staying power,” he says. 

Traditional beer styles seem to be Adams’ way of achieving that, as well as ever-expanding variety. Prolificacy is a trait he admires about his brewery. He likes brewing Hazy IPAs one day, Old World styles the next day, then sauntering off to check on the barrels in the barn. “We like [the daily variabilities], selfishly,” he says. “It keeps us energized. It keeps us engaged.”  

What has resulted from these efforts is a diverse taplist, but it’s only successful because of the team’s attention to detail. Adams refuses to compromise on quality across the spectrum. “Very few beers are static in our portfolio,” he says. “We’re iterating constantly, trying to improve.” Still, Adams believes he can do better. What’s more, he understands the risks of not doing better.

“[Zack is] always trying to make things better. He has this dedication to trying to make things better. The beer has to be good. I admire that. He is going to do all the research. He read books on Altbier. Traveled to Bamberg ahead of brewing a Rauchbier.”

“Consistency and quality, specifically, are tantamount to the security of small, independent brewers,” he says. “You can skate by brewing subpar beer for a while, but you’re not doing your peers in the industry any favors. The customers are also savvy enough to know what’s good and what’s not. What’s authentic and what’s not.”

“He is very much a student of brewing,” says Dave. “He is always reading. He will say, ‘There’s a lot I don’t know.’ He had an understanding of how big the iceberg is.”

That dedication often extends beyond where most would venture. “[Zack is] always trying to make things better,” says Sauter. “He has this dedication to trying to make things better. The beer has to be good. I admire that. He is going to do all the research. He read books on Altbier. Traveled to Bamberg ahead of brewing a Rauchbier.”

‘THIS WAS THE GOAL’

The barn that houses the barrels is an imposing architectural presence. The stone facade lends an air of rusticity; the Fox Farm logo sits subtly in a small window overlooking the property below. Oak, new and old, lines the walls. “We treat the barrels better than we treat ourselves,” Adams laughs, “but we knew if we wanted to commit ourselves to barrel-aging, those beers had to be done right. It required a certain degree of intent.”

Adams knew all along that a spontaneous ale program would be core to Fox Farm’s approach. As a lover of Lambic-style beer, though, he also realized that it would require a bit of patience. After all, you can’t blend one-, two-, and three-year-old beer if you don’t actually have one-, two-, and three-year-old beer to blend. 

“Pretty early on we were committing ourselves to some styles that are otherwise quite difficult to commit to in the turnaround time,” he says. “The failure rate associated with spontaneous beer is second to none as far as what it demands … between loving those beers and realizing, OK, if we can make something great here, that’s going to be very distinctive. No one will be able to recreate these beers.”

Adams doesn’t mean that in an arrogant sense. Spontaneous beer, fermented from the natural yeast and bacteria occurring all around us (as well as in the wood), is distinct to a time and a place. A brewer elsewhere could use the same recipe, but it would not yield the same result.

“I took a chance with Fox Farm because of their clear and obvious ethics and integrity in what they are and continue to do within the industry. I did fly out to interview, and not only were their intentions and vision for the brewery in line with what I was looking for in a job opportunity, but it was clear they were humble and well-meaning, good-hearted people. Best chance I ever took.”

But Adams knew he needed help tending to his barrels. For that, he looked west to Tillamook, Oregon, where de Garde Brewing Company was crafting some of the country’s best spontaneous beer. Though Dan Comstock, who formerly worked at the highly regarded Oregon outfit, had never before traveled east of Kentucky, he took a shot when he left de Garde to join Fox Farm in 2019.

“I took a chance with Fox Farm because of their clear and obvious ethics and integrity in what they are and continue to do within the industry,” says Comstock. “I did fly out to interview, and not only were their intentions and vision for the brewery in line with what I was looking for in a job opportunity, but it was clear they were humble and well-meaning, good-hearted people. Best chance I ever took.”

If Comstock’s calculated risk was driven by both the personal and professional impression left by Adams, the feeling was reciprocated.“We have similar sensibilities,” says Adams. “But we have similar practicalities.”

“We both are just mechanically minded and technical when it comes to our craft, and hold a strict attention to detail in high regard,” Comstock adds. “We are both long-time beer fans and have had a thirst of exploring what tradition and regional brewing has been bringing to the world for decades rather than having much interest in what new trends or fads are happening within the industry.”

The addition of Comstock in his self-described role as the wood cellar manager has raised Fox Farm’s ceiling. “I have to make sure Dan gets a ton of credit,” says Dave. “He’s meticulous, detail-orientated. Creativity is what brought those beers together. They’re well-cared for, checked-in-on. Dan is extremely creative and extremely disciplined. Those things don’t always go together.”

The spontaneous program, called Music Vale Composition as an homage to the street the brewery calls home, is set to be unveiled to the drinking public by early autumn. Comstock and Adams are champing at the bit. “It’s been a slow burn, but we’re hitting a level of maturity,” Adams says. “This was the goal.”

The first release, called Triolet, poured from an unlabeled green 750ml bottle during my visit, is gorgeous. The beer is a blend of three years of oak-aged beer that had been spontaneously inoculated in the upstairs coolship, and is an attempt to showcase local Connecticut microflora and malts. Well-rounded, earthy, and a touch acidic, the beer has evolved dramatically from tasting to tasting, according to Adams and Comstock. 

“We have never been in a rush,” says Dave. “[Spontaneous beer] will be the challenge. The other styles came naturally. We knew we had a long road to go. It’s cool to see this big challenge ahead, this new frontier.”

Put another way, if modern IPAs and traditional styles are a known entity, Wild Ales are in a living, breathing state of flux. “A different experience with these beers each time is OK,” says Comstock. “The beer will tell you where it wants to go.”

While Comstock reflects aloud on his expectations for the spontaneous beers, Adams looks on thoughtfully. It’s obvious that he values Comstock’s input and expertise. That openness is a quality that resonates throughout the company. “He listens,” Sauter says later. “He makes everyone feel like they are part of the crew.” 

FORTUNITY AND FORESIGHT

2020 was marred by many events that, in any other year, would have ranked as the top annual new story: An impeachment of a sitting president; anti-racism protests; a fraught and contentious election; and the deaths of political and culture figureheads like Civil Rights leader John Lewis, justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Kobe Bryant. Climate change caused unprecedented megafires in the West and the most active hurricane season ever recorded on the East Coast.

But no event dominated the headlines like the COVID-19 pandemic, which has claimed more than four million lives worldwide, a grim toll that is still climbing. Beer is trivial, comparatively, but everyone has their own COVID story, and Fox Farm is no different. 

“I remember that last Sunday of service,” says Sauter. “I could see the fear in Dave’s eyes. We open a bottle of an Oxbow beer on the porch. Dave and Zack were like, ‘What are we going to do?’”

“We all sat at this table here,” says Adams, pointing to where we’re sitting. “We shared some beers and I’m like, ‘Uh, this might not be here for a while.’ I thought we should enjoy some beers together and, um, maybe we can do this in like a month or two.” 

That week, Adams and his crew brewed a batch of Double IPA. He didn’t know what else to do. Even throughout COVID—and this is a testament to his idiosyncrasies—he cleaned his draft lines every two weeks. While many breweries rely on draft accounts and tasting room sales to stay afloat, Fox Farm’s distribution was relatively limited. Its tasting room sales boosted the bottom line, but its bread-and-butter was to-go sales. 

“I remember that last Sunday of service. I could see the fear in Dave’s eyes. We open a bottle of an Oxbow beer on the porch. Dave and Zack were like, ‘What are we going to do?’”

That meant a quick pivot was possible. “And Zack said, ‘We’ll do curbside. We’ll make it work,’” says Sauter.

The driveway at Fox Farm circles the barn. Cars enter and park on the right, and wheel around the building to exit. In the early days of the pandemic, beer could be ordered online, packaged by tasting room staff, and placed on oak barrels, enabling drivers to exit their vehicles and grab their orders quickly. There was no contact, no interaction. Even the workers could remain socially distanced from one another. If an employee was sick, says Sauter, they were told to stay home while still earning a paycheck.

This is the most telling anecdote about the culture at Fox Farm. As a pandemic raged globally, the staff at Fox Farm continually showed up at work, as they tell it, willingly and without pressure from above. Perhaps doing so provided some semblance of normalcy. But the romantic in me reckons that it had to do with belief in the philosophy and ethos of Fox Farm. In the face of calamity, people like Sauter happily made the commute to work, to see friends, to laugh, to help keep a business they love afloat.

That approach of care and mutual support is evident elsewhere, too. Sauter notes that six of the seven employees in the tasting room identify as women; when the craft beer industry’s recent #MeToo reckoning happened, Adams opened the floor for forthright conversations. “He asked if anything is amiss and if we felt we have a good, safe working environment. We told him it’s a great working environment. For me, it’s the best I’ve ever experienced,” Sauter says.

“We were fortunate,” Adams says. “When things are really, really rough out there, to be able to go to a brewery you love and want to support and buy beer—it’s a way to get some semblance of normalcy and enjoy something at a time where you just couldn’t get it from too many places.”  

“It was trauma bonding,” said Dave. “We spent months working in that environment, talking. We bonded through the experience. Before we were all friends and enjoyed a beer after work. A year after dealing with everything gave us a chance to form tighter bonds.” 

IN THE NOD TO TRADITION, A VISIBLE FUTURE

Like most of life, Fox Farm is a product of cosmic coincidence. It is the result of a confluence of events that, had they happened sooner or later or not at all, may have precluded this place from existing at all. It’s marrying into a family that ferments their own wine and has the foresight to gift a homebrew kit; it’s the confidence gained from recognition in a national homebrew competition; it’s inquiring about a property before it even comes on the market so there’s no competition; it’s taking $1,000 from the hard-earned family nest egg to hire a structural engineer; it’s not having to rely too heavily on draft accounts or tasting room sales and pivoting relatively quickly; it’s having a culture that inspired co-workers to continue to chip in during a once-in-a-lifetime global crisis.  

“We are extremely grateful to people who make the trip to Fox Farm,” says Dave. “We try to express our humility and gratitude. Our crew, partly because of all that happened, we’re a tight crew, we all know each other. We genuinely share that gratitude [that people come out]. There is a sincere sense of thankfulness they do.”

Adams has cultivated an environment that caters to numerous demographics, from the beer geeks to the locals trying to support a neighbor. There is a foursome of regulars who call themselves the Fox Farm Four. The employees seem happy and, like the barrels, well-cared for. Maybe, then, this is a story of the culture: Trying to both harken back and look forward.

“I think we’re trying to contribute to changing the culture of beer in this little corner of the world,” says Adams. “People see that we live here. They get a sense of family. With the tasting room back open, we get to engage with more people to give them a sense of who we are. But also how do we want alcohol, particularly beer, to be perceived by the younger generation? I think it’s wrong for it to be this thing that’s hidden in the shadows that parents do at night when kids go to bed.”

He reminisces about being in Bamberg. He watched a young kid take a pull of his father’s beer. It wasn’t novel, Adams says, or something to be laughed at. Kids are welcomed into those establishments the world over. He wonders how much those cultures can translate at home.  

“We’re just so fond of traditional brewing cultures and have such a reverence for what they do. From day one, the intent was to build a place with staying power, whatever that may be or whatever form that might take, but, you know, look at everything through the lens of a long-term goal instead of short-term profits.”

On every can, and on apparel and other merchandise, Fox Farm’s motto appears: “From the Soils Come the Spoils.” Taken literally, it speaks to the agrarian aspect of farm brewing. Grains, hops, and many ingredients used in Fox Farm beers do, in fact, come from the ground, and many are sourced locally. But read deeper and the context is unmistakable. This spot of land—for Adams and his family, for his employees, for the Fox Farm Four, for drinkers looking for an IPA or a Lager or a farmhouse Pale Ale, for a legacy and for a future—is producing something sacred.

Words by Matt Osgood
Photos by Melissa Jones