The house sits on top of the brewery, and in the high eaves, little dark diamonds of need, the open mouths of baby barn swallows, yawp over the side of their mud nest. Joe Alton and I tilt our own faces up to the sky to watch them as Mama and Papa barn swallow make forked-tail runs to retrieve treats from the skies above the blooming sweet clover and bobbing yellow heads of sow thistle. Alton ruefully tells me of the baby birds’ near-death experience at his very own hands.
“I saw that nest starting to get going,” Alton shares, “and I thought, ‘That’s going to be a mess; I better discourage them.’ But then there’s always something to do on a farm. By the time I hauled out the power washer, I looked up and saw one little beak peek out—and I couldn’t do it.”
Now the barn swallow family makes a mess on the deck just outside Alton’s kitchen window, which looks out at his windmill, where Abi and Moosh—big matching deer-colored dogs—like to watch the neighbor’s cow.
Alton tells me the story of these barn swallows as he takes me on a tour of his new digs, the former Dave’s BrewFarm, now called Botany BrewFarm. I’m here, an hour-plus outside of the Cities and deep into Wisconsin farmlands, because Alton has been, for a decade, the most connected man in Minnesota beer: former editor in chief of The Growler, Minnesota’s now-shuttered beer-focused monthly; co-founder of the enormous recurrent Beer Dabbler festivals; consultant; marketer; coconspirator in the launching of restaurant pop-ups; and omnipresent wandering guest of honor at every brewery opening in the busy brewery-opening decade that followed 2011. That was when Minnesota’s modern beer revolution sprang from the passage of the so-called Surly bill, which modernized taproom and brewery regulations, zooming us from a couple dozen pre-2010 breweries to our current scene of 200-plus. Joe Alton is one of the central personalities of Minnesota beer, so when he decamped to Wisconsin, I went to find out why.
As we wander around his new 35-acre world, I listen to him talk of process, potential, and promise, and I begin to understand. A neighbor joins the tour, and he tells her of the barn swallows. Later, I talk to a friend of his, who asks me if I saw the barn swallows. I feel like everyone in America these days spends time trading back and forth various examples of the wisdom of Maya Angelou: When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. Joe Alton is a man who is really thinking a lot about barn swallow chicks.
If you want to know why the most connected man in Minnesota beer moved to the middle of nowhere, where you need a tractor with a plow attachment if you want to leave the house in snow season, consider these barn swallows. But first, consider the man.
Where to Start
Joe Alton is tall. He’s strong, he’s bearded, and he has the handsome, all-American-guy-at-the-hardware-store vibe of Chris Pine or Ben Affleck. He’s chatty and has the easygoing host’s skill of showering all those around with mild compliments, saying things like, “It’s amazing that you picked that up. You are one of the few people who will understand.”
“Joe was our first front-of-the-house manager at Brasa in St. Paul,” recalls James Beard Award–winning chef Alex Roberts, who Alton credits as his restaurant mentor. “He is a truly gifted hospitality person. He naturally takes care of people, he’s a connector, he brings people together. He just has that way about him. He can talk to chefs about food, brewers about brewing, businesspeople about business. He has a curiosity and interest in what others do that they sense is real, because it is.”
Asked if any examples come to mind, Roberts brings up a curious one. Restaurants, of course, get deliveries all the time, of produce, meat, and beverages. Delivery trucks are packed in a particular way, in reverse order of delivery with items for the last stop packed first, deep into the truck, to make the delivery route fast and efficient for the driver. “I’ve worked with cooks who are receiving deliveries for a decade and never totally get what the route drivers are doing with their time and logistics, why you can’t suddenly get limes you forgot to order. Joe is the kind of person who understood the ins and outs of a delivery person’s route and day, the limitations, the wiggle room, and made them his friends—it was remarkable to observe in real time.”
“He’s a genuine person, a caring person,” says Ramsey Louder, the current head brewer at Grand Rapids Brewing Company in Michigan. “He makes sincere gestures without looking for anything in return. And he knows everybody.”
But everybody doesn’t know him, due to Alton’s tendency to put the spotlight on everyone but himself.
The Early Years
Please meet the real Joe Alton. He descends from two people who walked that very Minnesotan path of growing up super bright in small towns and then heading to the Twin Cities to build what they could build. Brian Alton, Joe’s dad, comes from a long line of western Wisconsin farmers. He grew up in River Falls and came to St. Paul to become an attorney for small businesses and the sort of doting dad that would wait with a kid outside of Target Center till midnight to get a Timberwolves autograph.
Mary Alton, Joe’s mom, grew up in Morris, a farm town near Alexandria, and came to St. Paul to become one of Minnesota’s first professional lawyers specializing in mediation. But by the time Joe was born, Mary’s life was already marked by tragedy. Her first husband, dad to Joe’s older brother, died unexpectedly at an early age. Joe always knew her as a listener with an understanding of what’s difficult. “She was the soul of the house, the center of my life,” Alton tells me as I follow him around from oak to windmill to brew tank at Botany. “You could talk to her about anything, anything.”
Alton’s St. Paul childhood was mischievous and bold. His dad tried to get him to go to swimming lessons at the University Club, but Joe would walk through the gates, wait for his dad to leave, then go and spend his time messing around in the woods of the bluffs down below the mansions. He always loved the woods and the family cabin in Alexandria. He’d go up with his parents for the weekends and sometimes just decide to stay out with his grandma so he could poke around. He grew into a BMX kid who flipped bikes off dirt tracks. He was also a camping kid who was good enough with canoes to become a guide with YMCA Camp St. Croix and a hip-hop-grunge-skate kid. “Those two parts of me are very much still two parts of me,” he says now.
By the time he reached St. Paul Central High School in the late 1990s, Alton really started coming into his own: able to talk to anyone, comfortable in the lunchroom at the Hmong tables, the Black tables, the Latino tables, all the tables. “I was always really resistant to the idea that tribalism was a good thing, and I really dislike the idea of putting anyone in boxes, so I became the peacemaker,” says Alton.
That naturally led to Alton’s hospitality phase. He was a bouncer and barback at Billy’s on Grand, a job roughly equivalent to lion taming, especially on St. Patrick’s Day. He bartended everywhere, including at Longfellow Grill (with current bar luminaries Tattersall founder Dan Oskey and Hola Arepa co-founder Birk Grudem) and at Porter and Frye under Steven Brown. He built the fancy European beer list at Margaux, and he ran the front of the house for the St. Paul Brasa under chef Alex Roberts.
Wanting a little more adventure in his life, Alton took a job where his hospitality skills and his know-how with tents came together: He started running those brand tents at festivals, the kinds where someone hands out Stonyfield Yogurt or Clif Bars. At one such festival, Alton ducked out, changed shirts, and went to have a cigarette. He bumped into Matt Kenevan, who would one day found Growler and Beer Dabbler. Kenevan noticed Alton, noticed his changed shirt, and observed it was a classy move with Alton protecting the brand. Out of that cigarette break (a habit Alton’s since left behind), a key business relationship in Minneapolis’s beer scene was born.
First, in 2008, the two launched the beer festivals that would morph into Beer Dabbler. Kenevan had been a region sales executive for the Twin Cities outpost of the The Onion, with local ads. In 2012, when The Onion decided to shut down its satellite in the Twin Cities, Kenevan figured he could keep his ad clients and create new editorial to complement the festivals. The two launched The Growler.
Let’s summarize Alton’s next few years as: Dabbler, Growler, hoist a pint, hear a dream, publish the news; Dabbler, Growler, hoist a pint, rinse, repeat. He scrambled to the top of the mountain of the local beer scene and lived there for six years, until 2018, when it wasn’t fun anymore. “I have a broad-stroke philosophy,” Alton explains. “Beer is supposed to be the thing at the table that libates us to talk about other things; it is not supposed to be the main thing we talk about.”
Yet the more time he spent in beer world, the more he found himself the biggest target in every room for beer connoisseurs who wanted to talk about this flaw of a phenolic ester, that shocking score on the Untappd app, and did you hear about the scandal of the tavern with unclean beer lines?
“I just was done with the idea of nitpicking connoisseurship as a way of being in the world,” he says. “Don’t get me wrong: A quality craft beverage should be taken seriously, but not pretentiously. I’d actually argue that pretentiousness is silly, reductive. It takes away from the seriousness.”
In the spring of 2018, Alton felt like he wanted a step back, a reevaluation. He resigned from Beer Dabbler and Growler, figured he’d spend the summer camping with his dog Sophie and think things through. “Sophie, I rescued her when I was 19 or 20,” he shares. “She’d been my best friend, my life partner—with me my whole life, it felt like. We did everything together. Two days after I quit the Growler, she died.”
He went to his mom’s house. “What a week; the bottom has fallen out,” he recalls saying. “My mom, she was so compassionate, so level-headed, so fair, just a guiding light on all things. She always challenged me to think I could do big things. She listened to my heartbreak and set me right.”
Then he says, “The next week she called: ‘I don’t feel so well; can you take me to the hospital?’ I was like: ‘The hospital? That’s pretty extreme, but all right.’ She died. I cannot tell you how lost I was. It was like I was a ghost in my own skin. One day I had this busy job and a big public identity, a best friend, a mom. A week later, all gone.”
“This isn’t a craft beer destination road trip. It’s a playground for ideas.”
—Joe Alton
Shifting Reality
Alton spent the rest of the summer of 2018 grieving and reckoning. “When the pandemic left people saying things like, ‘Nothing will ever be the same, I’m in shock, I don’t know how to live or what to do,’ I felt like, Wow, me too, but I got to this party a little early.”
What do you do when you know everybody, but grief rips your heart out and you don’t know the right next step? “I put online, mainly as a joke, ‘What should I be when I grow up?’” recalls Alton. David Anderson, the original creator and founder of Dave’s BrewFarm, posted: “cough-BrewFarm-cough.”
Anderson had been thinking, off and on, about selling his dream, 35 acres of rolling hills outside Wilson, Wisconsin, where he had installed geothermal heat and a windmill and a seven-barrel small but functional brew system. Anderson had reached a point where he wanted to sell the dream, but he did not want to sell to someone he thought might wreck it. “I was up on that dirt for 13 years, connecting to nature. It sounds corny, kitsch, but you’re up there, and you are immersed in so many facets that are lost on most people who don’t spend time in nature,” he says. “It’s a little bit of paradise. So how do you sell paradise, and to who?”
He put it up for sale in 2014 briefly, “and the tire kickers were out in force,” Anderson tells me. “The setting is beautiful; we’ve had three weddings beneath that big oak, and I’d like that oak to see what humans are up to for a while, so I wanted a legacy buyer, someone to protect the legacy, appreciate the beauty but keep it in balance with nature. I quickly realized most people were not anywhere near up to the task. The brew farm needed cash and competence.”
Competence, in this case, being the ability to both brew beer and to see and steward beauty. Joe Alton passed the competency test when the two had long conversations about the hard work of a farm and their mutual distaste for connoisseurship. “The first rule of BrewFarm is we don’t talk about BrewFarm,” says Anderson. “Your beer at a brew farm should be so good that people drive across the state to get some and then are so inspired, you all talk about other topics.”
The Present
It’s Alton’s world now. As we toured around his new 35-acre brew farm, he told me everything he considered important: Here are the fleshy leaves and spiraling tendrils of the emerging pumpkin patch, where kids will be able to pick up something special toward Halloween. Here are the dark cool vines of Fredonia grapes, winding up the deck rails—might they be used for fruit sours? Here’s the coolship—a rectangular open steel tank, sort of like a gigantic stainless steel restaurant kitchen sink—that his brewer will fill with beer and then allow to sit open to the sky so the beer may pick up the unique yeasts and microbial community of his farm before it gets pumped back into a tank to create beer that carries the flavors unique to this terroir. Here’s the glassy greenhouse, for growing all sorts of fruits and vegetables—we’ll see. Here’s the vintage Airstream—it will join platform tents for farm stays.
Wait, that’s not all. Here are the hops, sprouting from bulbous rhizomes—partly for show, but they will be an essential ingredient for a few batches of beer. Here’s a whole bunch of wild carrot in flower. Maybe the seeds can be used to flavor a gruit, that beer style that was popular before hops became the world’s dominant beer flavor. Here’s the 100-year-old oak tree, curling into the sky.
Here’s how the brew farm works: It’s built into a hill, with living quarters upstairs, the brewery below, three sides buried into the hill so the brewery is always cellar temperature. Here’s who will make the beer: Rush River’s head brewer, Brett Bakko, not Alton. Never Alton—he cares too much about the technical skills of beer to think he can do it himself. He got all the Dave’s BrewFarm recipes and intellectual property and might contract-brew a BrewFarm beer for Twin Cities store shelves—we’ll see.
The Future
To the west of Botany BrewFarm is an abandoned cemetery. There, farmers of a time before the internet lie beneath moss, among the pines. Farther west, about an hour’s drive, is the Twin Cities. As it was for these long-slumbering farmers, so it is for Alton: It’s the money and the people in the Cities that allow economic survival.
Alton sketches out his vision for Botany, the next thing in beer around here, maybe the next thing in culture. Here’s the plan: He has the place, and he knows the people. He’ll make small-batch weird experimental beers out of things from his land for customers who like small-batch weird experimental beers, and he’ll sell bottled lagers made by lager-specialist brewers and wine from winemakers for people who like those. He’ll make sumac tea, maybe ferment it into kombucha. If there’s a band, it can play here. A family can picnic here. City people need farm relaxation; farm people need city money. He can trade venison for eggs or trade consulting for pop-ups.
The dream for the brew farm is hard to articulate because it’s a thing that’s never been done before. As the North House Folk School is to creating a space for every sort of art and craft and student, as First Avenue is to every sort of performer and audience, so will Botany BrewFarm be to all things food and beverage and also farms. Chef farm dinners and wild-foraging nature walks. Maybe a crew from a brewery will come out and have their staff party, grill a leg of lamb, create and babysit overnight a coolship of something novel, camp under the stars.
“This isn’t a craft beer destination road trip,” says Alton. “It’s a playground for ideas, for programming, for trying things out. I don’t want anyone who doesn’t drink beer to think this place is not for them. It’s about fermentation of nonalcoholic beverages too, like tea, and it’s about experiencing slowing down, walking around a farm field.”
I ask Alton how Botany BrewFarm will fit into the current Twin Cities beer scene, and he says that’s sort of like asking if a newborn baby will be a good shortstop. “It doesn’t fit into the current Minnesota brewing scene, because there’s nothing else like it. In some ways—and some of my best friends will kill me for saying this—but right now, beer is boring, beer is tired. So much has settled into formula. Where does the next creativity come from? Maybe here.”
And So He Begins
Alton moved into Botany on New Year’s Eve. He hadn’t told anyone that’s what he was doing. Then friends heard, swooped by in ball gowns and suits, and helped him literally roll out the carpets. Ever since, he’s been making plans, trellising hops, fixing and digging and doing all the things you do on a farm, including cleaning—except, of course, that one peak in the house eaves.
When I leave Botany, the sun is setting, and the barn swallow parents are making twilight runs out from the nest, arrowing above the fields, zipping back and forth, and when the parents return to the nest, a chorus of life rings out—that peep peep peep of need, of fulfillment.
A week after, I called back to ask about the birds. They were making an increasing mess, reported Alton, while also growing in symbolic importance. “Part of my thing with the birds is like this feeling of imposter syndrome. How can you have a farm if barn swallows get the better of you? Part of it is like, when I am at a crossroads, I try to default to humanity, to kindness, but then sometimes second-guess myself. And another part is hospitality. Where caretaking and hospitality meet, that’s one place I’m good at. I enjoy hosting people. I love that two people from completely different parts of the world can be nourished by the same food and beverage. I will go out of my way to make guests happy, sometimes to my own detriment. I can be an empath to an absolutely poisonous degree.” Are those birds taking advantage of him, or are those birds his good path? What are we even talking about when we talk about barn swallows? Are we talking about home?
Is it that your mom was your spiritual anchor, I ask, and when she was gone, you needed a new anchor, and that’s the farm? “One hundred,” says Alton. “That’s the word that was actually in my mind. Anchor. Anchor as nature, anchor for my beautiful community. But then those birds are like: Is my core humanity my greatest asset, or am I totally off base?”
Look for those barn swallows, or their descendants, in the skies above Botany, either this fall in the “getting going” version or in 2023, when Alton expects to be fully operational. They’ll be combing the sky, plucking insects from the air, and helping the most connected man in beer connect everyone he already knows to everyone he’ll know one day, and also to himself.