Leaving the Edges Wild — Wooly Pig Farm Brewery in Fresno, Ohio

It’s mid-morning on a bitterly cold December day, and I’m being stared down by a guard llama named Miss Ferocity.

A steady stream of sheep walk around her from their grazing spot on a low hill to the gate of their pasture, where a new ram is being introduced, but Miss Ferocity isn’t paying any attention to the animals she is tasked with defending. She only has eyes for me, the newcomer, the possible threat. 

As I stand transfixed by the South American ungulate, whose eyes drill holes through me from 10 yards away, I’m slow to notice a soft but insistent tug on my flannel shirt. When I look down, I find its hem is being eaten by a one-eyed goat named Hoppy Phils. Here at Wooly Pig Farm Brewery in the Appalachian foothills of eastern Ohio, all of this is perfectly normal.

Wooly Pig is a farm brewery in the truest sense of the term. Words like “farmhouse” and “rustic” get tossed around lightly in craft beer, but this small brewery earns its descriptors by creating its impeccable Lagers on a working farm that has existed for 160 years, and integrating the livestock and agriculture of the property into the operation of the brewing business. Taking its name from the curly-haired pigs that graze on a hillside behind the brewery, and which consume its organic waste, Wooly Pig is charting a path forward for small farms who are struggling against Big Agriculture in much the same way small breweries have battled Big Beer in the marketplace. 

And they’re brewing some fantastic German Lagers in the process.

OLD-WORLD INSPIRATION

Wooly Pig’s German connection goes deeper than its preferred beer styles. The brewery was founded by Kevin Ely and his wife, Jael Malenke, as well as Jael’s brother and sister-in-law, Aaron and Lauren Malenke. Prior to 2016, Ely was the brewmaster at Uinta Brewing in Utah—he helped develop that brewery’s popular Baba Black Lager—and that position required him to travel regularly to Bavaria and Franconia in southern Germany to source equipment and ingredients. On one of those trips he rode a bicycle through the countryside and noticed a number of small breweries that kept pigs on site to consume their spent grain. He took some photos and came home without thinking much of it.

Lauren Malenke was in school to become a large animal veterinarian at the time, and she and Aaron were fascinated by the strange-looking hairy pigs in Ely’s photos. They were also struck by the similarities between the Franconian landscape and their own region of eastern Ohio, where Aaron and Jael had grown up. 

“Just north of Nuremberg is a region called Fränkische Schweiz—Franconian Switzerland—where there’s about a hundred breweries, and at the northern end is Bamberg, the home of Rauchbier,” explains Ely. “Our area of Ohio is known as Little Switzerland. All of my photos looked like Coshocton County, with rolling hills and pasture, croplands and woodlands.”

The major difference was that while the residents of Fränkische Schweiz had all the breweries they could want, the Malenkes’ home of Coshocton County had none.

When property adjacent to Jael and Aaron’s parents became available, they all decided it was time to change that. Ely and Jael moved back from Utah, and Aaron and Lauren began building an off-the-grid house on the property (Ely and Jael are currently completing their own). They wanted to establish a brewery that would appeal to their rural community while also serving as a destination for residents of Columbus, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh, from which the brewery is roughly equidistant. And they wanted to preserve the property’s identity as a working farm.

The original 45 acres the couples purchased (now expanded to 90 acres) had belonged to the Norman family since the Civil War, given as a land-grant for service. The last of the Normans, Ronnie, took over the farm when his father died; he was only 13 years old at the time. He lived there with his mother until she passed, then alone until his death. He had no siblings, no partner, no children. Rumor has it he left the county only twice in his life—once to go to Washington D.C. for a school field trip, and once to go to a Cleveland Indians baseball game. 

“Just north of Nuremberg is a region called Fränkische Schweiz—Franconian Switzerland—where there’s about a hundred breweries, and at the northern end is Bamberg, the home of Rauchbier. Our area of Ohio is known as Little Switzerland. All of my photos looked like Coshocton County, with rolling hills and pasture, croplands and woodlands.”

“He was a dairy farmer, and because he was the only one here, he had to milk the cows in the morning and evening,” explains Aaron. “It didn’t leave much time for anything else.”

Establishing a brewery on the land while maintaining its farming traditions was a way of paying respect to the Normans’ legacy while also showing how a small farm can remain sustainable through diversification.

“This was a way of using the land that continues to be an active farm but doesn’t rely on that,” says Jael. “When Ronnie died, he had debts. He was poor. He was running his business through debt. What we’re doing is one way to run a small farm with the same amount of space, less equipment, and turn a profit on it while still paying respect to the land. We’re not burning through resources on the farm. We’re using our imaginations and skills to juggle the difficulty of a small farm while doing something different and new.”

In this case, different and new involve a herd of 300-pound pigs covered in curly, wiry hair.

A SYMBIOTIC FARM BREWERY

The pigs Ely first photographed in Franconia all those years ago are a breed known as Mangalitsas, which originate from Hungary. They intrigued Lauren, who now works as a vet both on the farm and for a local practice, and she and Aaron decided to do more research. Only a few people were raising them in Ohio at the time.

“This breed was brought over from Hungary and Eastern Europe in the last decade or so,” Aaron explains. “We purchased a couple. Not with the idea that this was going to be part of the brewery yet, but just for ourselves.”

Mangalitsas are good foragers. They like to be out on pasture, and their home climate and terrain are very similar to that of eastern Ohio. They took to their new home eagerly, and the crew quickly realized they could become a legitimate part of the business. When it was time to set up and launch the brewery, they knew what its name would be. The Mangalitsas are more than a mascot—they’re the heart of Wooly Pig.

“All the organic by-products of brewing are given to the pigs,” explains Ely. “The spent grain, the hop and protein trub from the boil, and the green beer and yeast after fermentation. Even the draught drip trays feed into some buckets, and then if someone doesn’t finish a beer, that goes in, and it all goes to the pigs.”

Not only does this eliminate the need to transport the brewery waste off-site, but it also has a significant ecological impact on site.

“It helps us manage our wastewater,” says Ely. “It reduces the biological loading of our waste management system. There are fewer suspended solids, and it lowers the BOD [biological oxygen demand] content. And, of course, it’s feeding the animals.”

The cycle is completed when the hogs are butchered for meat. It turns out Mangalitsas are excellent charcuterie pigs, and Aaron now sells various cuts of pork through the brewery.

David Marrison, an associate professor at Ohio State and a field educator with the Ohio State Ag Extension office in Coshocton—a university department that promotes and educates Ohio’s agriculture industry—sees what Wooly Pig is doing as a model for how land can be used in creative ways to help small farms thrive.

“They’re a beautiful example of diversification,” he says. “They’re capitalizing on all the resources they’ve been entrusted with, and they’ve grounded themselves in a sound business plan. Every member of the family has a unique role and the business plays off the strengths of each of them.”

Marrison has been so impressed with Wooly Pig that he hosted a farm management in-service day at the brewery in September. Ag Extension educators and professionals from across the state visited the brewery, toured the different areas of the business, and sat through a presentation by the founders.

“They loved the attention to detail in the business plan and strategic goals, and loved how the agricultural component was integrated into the brewery,” he recalls. “These folks could have started a farm brewery anywhere, but they came back here to fulfill their dream. Not only are they a farm brewery, but they’re in the top tier of breweries in Ohio producing these types of beer.”

A BREWERY MENAGERIE

Before I’m stared down by Miss Ferocity—the sheep and their four-legged protector live in another area of the property—I’m introduced to Wooly Pig’s porcine royalty: a 600-lb. boar named Herr Fuggles and his breeding sows, Willamette and Galena. They’re kept in a small pasture with a lean-to barn adjacent to the brewery’s rolling, farmyard lawn, so guests can visit the pigs with a mug of Rustic Helles or Keller Pils in hand. 

Fuggles is sleeping when we reach his enclosure, and he’s reluctant to get up—there’s a foot-long twig still stuck to his face as he ambles over to the fence. Jael breaks open a couple pumpkins that have frozen outside and drops them in the pen. Fuggles and his companions make quick work of the squash, and then they need something to wash down their meal. If you’ve never watched large pigs slurp Dunkel out of a trough, just know they’re sloppy drinkers.

The main herd of pigs lives on a hilly pasture behind the taproom, but if they don’t want you to see them, you’ll never know they’re there. You might not think large farm animals would be good at hiding, but that’s only if you’ve never seen a Mangalitsa. Their mottled coat blends in perfectly with the tall, golden grass of the unkempt pasture, and they love nothing more than lying down and nesting in the dry vegetation. Even in the depths of winter, they prefer to be outdoors.

“Pigs and breweries have a really old relationship. Pigs are a natural partner for breweries because you can feed them 100% of their diet as spent grain, whereas other livestock have a lot of limitations with that.”

“Pigs take leaves and branches and build a nest,” explains Aaron. “They actually cover themselves completely up. I’ve walked by them in the pasture looking for piglets, and literally two feet away there was a 350-lb. pig with a litter of babies and I didn’t notice. When one of the sows had our first litter of piglets it was on a classic 35-degree rainy November day. She had them in the pasture.”

True enough, there isn’t a pig anywhere in sight. Jael emits a loud, whooping call I can’t begin to render phonetically, and soon I can see movement. From different areas of the hill, the grass is stirring, and pigs emerge. They’re in no hurry, but move steadily and patiently down the incline in the shallow snow like congregants to be baptized in a river. They, too, are about to be treated to pumpkins.

“Most of our pigs are on pasture all year,” says Jael as the first pig—the highest-ranking sow of the group, she explains—claims her pumpkin. “They never go in a barn. We see them playing in snow all winter long.”

“Pigs in general actually really love the cold,” says Aaron. “Mangalitsas are even more hardy. These ones have inches of fat around them, plus the hair.” 

Watching these pigs root around in the snow, energetic but relaxed, the winter landscape feels like their happiest possible home.

“Heat is much more of a danger to them than the cold,” adds Ely while the pigs tear apart the gourds, small spats breaking out between them over the best portions. “These pigs can handle colder climates than here, but they couldn’t handle warmer climates. We’re on a hillside, there’s lots of ravines, and with the springs, they have lots of wallows. So in the summertime they go hide from the heat. When it’s hot, they’re big slugs. When it’s cold, they’re happy.”

In addition to the pumpkins, the pigs forage on the partially wooded pasture as well. In the summer and fall, Aaron says you can hear black walnuts and hickory nuts cracking as the pigs chew them. The herd’s primary food source, though, is the organic waste from the brewery, and the relationship between brewing and raising pigs to eat the spent grain is a time-honored tradition in Germany and elsewhere in Europe.

“Pigs and breweries have a really old relationship,” explains Jael. “Pigs are a natural partner for breweries because you can feed them 100% of their diet as spent grain, whereas other livestock have a lot of limitations with that.”

When Ely was in Franconia, he saw how symbiotic this relationship could be.

“A lot of these farm breweries have pigs, and a lot of times historically and still occasionally, they’ll have the pig barn right next to the brewery, so as you’re augering out [moving the spent grain from the lauter tun using a corkscrew auger], you can send your spent grain right out of the lauter tun into the pig pen,” he explains. Because of food safety regulations—and considerations of smell—Wooly Pig instead dumps its spent grain and trub into carts to be wheeled to the pasture.

“The spent grain is a great source of protein, and trub and wort provide carbs,” explains Lauren. “This helps us reduce feed costs and improve the environmental sustainability of the farm and brewery. A lot of farms use spent grain as a feed supplement, but it has a short shelf life and transporting it can be expensive and time-consuming. We can feed it to them the same day.”

During the colder months, she mentions an added bonus that brings comfort to both the farmers and the animals. “It makes you feel good to feed the pigs a steaming warm mash in the middle of winter.”

FARMHOUSE LAGERS

Most visitors to Wooly Pig are amused by the pigs (especially when there’s a litter of adorable wooly piglets to see), but beer remains the main attraction. Ely is crafting excellent German Lagers on the farm, and he’s winning over both locals used to macro Lagers and city folks used to chasing the latest IPA. At Uinta, he brewed a wide range of styles, but a local homebrewing competition allowed him to follow his passion. The winner of the competition had brewed a Black Lager, and he and Ely developed it further before entering it into the Pro-Am Competition at the Great American Beer Festival. They won a silver medal, and the beer became Baba Black Lager.

When he left to start Wooly Pig, he knew he wanted to brew Lagers that would remind him of southern Germany as much as the landscape and pigs did. While he brews a handful of more unusual beers, including a Coffee Pils and a Pawpaw Pils made with pawpaws foraged from the area, classic Lagers run the show here. The beers are brewed on a 5-BBL system with dual kettles and a dedicated lauter tun. The kettles can be used as either mash or wort kettles, allowing Ely to essentially run his brewhouse as a modern five-vessel system.

“It allows us to brew at a pretty fast pace,” he explains. “Nothing is sitting and not being happy. You want your process to happen quickly, because you want the next process to start. A modern two-vessel pub system leads to a lot of sitting around, which is not necessarily the best thing for the quality of the wort.”

“We are reaching a local demographic. Farmers and factory workers. We are not a wealthy area. We all went to the local high school. My mom ran the local museum. We had pretty deep roots, but I didn’t think we’d get as many people from the community.”

After fermentation, the wort is sent to a large walk-in cooler filled with nine 10-BBL horizontal lagering tanks stacked floor to ceiling. Once they’re ready, the beers are served straight off these tanks.

The brewery’s best-selling beer is its Rustic Helles, a gorgeous keller-style Munich Helles with soft, bready malt flavors, balancing noble hop bitterness and a dry, crisp finish.

“I cannot tell you how many times I have been behind the bar and someone local has come up to me and said, ‘You guys do fancy beer, huh? Do you have any light beers?’” says Jael with a laugh. “After they drink the Helles, they start to branch out and soon they’re Rye Dunkel drinkers, or Schwarzbier drinkers, or they’re trying the Baltic Porter.”

That community receptivity has been a huge part of Wooly Pig’s success. “We are reaching a local demographic,” says Aaron. “Farmers and factory workers. We are not a wealthy area. We all went to the local high school. My mom ran the local museum. We had pretty deep roots, but I didn’t think we’d get as many people from the community.”

Local enthusiasm took time to grow, but as the community saw the hard work and respect for the land the Wooly Pig team was putting in—and tasted the delicious, approachable beers—they began to claim the brewery as their own.

“We have become a community center for a lot of locals,” says Jael. “It has been really fun to get to know our neighbors and be a place where they bring their guests from out of town or come here on weeknights to hang out and have a beer.”

PROTECTING THE FLOCK

The pasture with the sheep and their stoic guardian lies half a mile from the taproom up a hilly, one-lane road through the woods. As Jael and I step out of her car and walk to the fence, I can already tell I’ve upset Miss Ferocity, even from a couple hundred yards away. 

“She’s spotted you,” says Jael with a grin. “Now she’ll track you.”

And she does. Anywhere I move along the fence, the eyes follow me. After a few minutes, she follows the sheep to stand watch from much nearer, but still doesn’t break eye contact. The farm had a guard llama before Miss Ferocity, but it died unexpectedly. They weren’t even sure it was actually doing anything, but after it died, they lost eight sheep to coyotes that spring.

“The llama will scare off coyotes,” says Aaron. “If we bring a dog, she gets all riled up. She’ll chase a dog along the fence. I’m hoping she’ll do the job this lambing season. I’m bringing the rams in now, and I’ll have lambs in late April or early May.” 

Hoppy Phils, nibbler of flannel shirts, doesn’t have a specific role on the farm beyond bringing a general sense of cheerful frivolity to his surroundings. He used to spend his time wandering around the brewery’s beer garden when he was little, but the goat’s lack of boundaries is less charming now that he’s full-grown than when he was a kid. 

“Goats like to have physical interaction,” Aaron says. “He’s very sweet, but he’s a little too playful to be just roaming around. He was jumping onto tables and trying to eat people’s wallets when they weren’t looking.” 

Elsewhere on the property are a mammoth Jack (a male donkey) named Balaam after Balaam’s talking donkey in the Old Testament, a horse named Duke, a couple ponies, and two friendly dogs that will come and say hello if you take your beer outside (and you should—there are heated huts called salettl around the beer garden if it’s cold) to enjoy this still-mostly-wild space. Beyond the meaningful roles all the animals of Wooly Pig perform on the farm, the families who live here believe the livestock also provide points of connection between visitors and the working farm.

“It speaks to the farm nature,” says Jael. “This is an actual farm, an old farm. The animals—especially the pigs—are also sort of whimsical and don’t take themselves too seriously, so we’ve got that going for us.”

Wooly Pig isn’t the only brewery who has discovered this point of connection that farm animals provide. Breweries like Scratch Brewing in Illinois and Fibonacci Brewing in Ohio both have goats on site, while Jester King Brewery in Texas maintains an entire goat herd (among other livestock). Stone Cow Brewing in Massachusetts incorporates a commercial dairy cow herd into their business.

“Farming today is often just commercialized and industrial. A lot of people who come here have never seen an actual farm animal up close,” echoes Aaron. “There’s a lot of breweries in Ohio, but not many on a farm that’s actually working. There are ‘farm breweries’ where I walk in and it’s like, ‘Um, this is not a farm.’ We are not a polished place. We have kept this a farm. I think people like that.” 

The good people behind Wooly Pig Farm Brewery have left the edges wild on their 90-acre spread in the foothills of eastern Ohio. The narrow drive off Highway 36 is laid like a weather-worn ribbon over the hills and valleys, and the animals and humans have built their own nests and shelters to hunker down against the winter wind. Everything here lives in cooperation with the land rather than in opposition to it, working with it like a friend rather than subduing it like a foe. The rustic Lagers that flow from the taps are perfect representations of that hard-working spirit, offering an approachable, laid-back welcome but rewarding closer attention with refinement and perfect drinkability. The hems are ragged here, and that’s just how they should be.

Words + Photos
David Nilsen