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GRAIN AND GRATITUDE Exposure to farming inspires continuing education BY YAKNTORO UDOUMOH
“Let’s show you around the farm,” Chad Butters, founder of Eight Oaks Farm Distillery, quipped on a brisk January morning in New Tripoli, Pennsylvania. Outside, away from the warmth of the distillery floor, we stepped out into an apparent frozen tundra. The land appeared as clean ivory with gray stalks piercing from the ground as foreboding pikes, external remnants from last year’s harvest. Just yesterday, the heavens had opened and snow had pelted the ground leading to the terrain of slick ice this morning. With Chad as my guide, we pressed out into the aforementioned bleak and barren expanse towards the largest manmade structures in the immediate area. Our target, a gray foreboding group of colossus pointing straight into the sky,
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seemingly grew larger as Chad and I approached closer in a red pickup truck. The number eight, the logo of Eight Oaks Farm Distillery, emblazoned proudly on the front of the structure, was cocked at an angle, almost signifying a metamorphosis to infinity in terms of the structure’s size. All of Eight Oaks’s previous year’s grain harvest are kept in these mammoth silos and transferred over to smaller silos near the distillery when needed. The truck stopped and Chad opened the driver side door. I followed suit on the passenger side. Today’s lesson started as an intricate game of attempting not to fall flat on my face in supposedly non-slip sneakers while attempting to listen to Chad wax and wane on grain silo operations and the
importance of managing grain temperature and humidity. “Push this button here”, Chad instructed, “and I’m going over here to turn this one on.” I skated forward while Chad marched around a corner towards another silo. I pushed a green button on a gray metallic box. A fan spun up producing a boreal gale inside the silo. Apparently, I had just begun this month’s session of cooling and drying wheat berries. Once a month during cold and dry conditions, the Eight Oaks crew fans their grain, blowing massive amounts of cubic feet of cold dry air per minute to prevent grain spoilage encouraged by warm humidity. I had never witnessed such a process at any distillery that I had visited, but I imagine it would be commonplace
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