CO-OP PEOPLE
Get acquainted with Bavarian-style beers and an Old World breed in Coshocton County. BY DAMAINE VONADA
O
n Fridays, Wooly Pig Farm Brewery officially opens at 3 p.m., but by 2:30, friends and neighbors are already sitting down at the natural-edge wooden tables that brewmaster Kevin Ely and his family made from a prodigious elm tree on their property. Young, curly-haired pigs eagerly forage in a pasture above the parking lot, while Herr Fuggle, the farm’s porcine patriarch, snoozes in a pen. Aaron Malenke, Kevin’s brother-in-law and the farmer who tends the pigs, returns from hunting mushrooms just about the time that a food truck starts serving burgers. The first customer to snag a beer is a local woman who
cheerily waves to Kevin and his wife, Jael Malenke. “That lady gave me a haircut yesterday,” Kevin says with a grin. Though only minutes from U.S. 36, Wooly Pig Farm Brewery sits off a windy township road in eastern Coshocton County and seems tucked far away in the countryside. Spread across 90 hilly acres and graced by a red barn built in 1899, it was once a dairy farm owned for more than 150 years by the Norman family. “Aaron and I grew up near this farm,” says Jael. “I remember coming here to sing Christmas carols to the Normans.” When the farm was for sale in 2014, Jael was finishing her Ph.D. in biology at the University of Utah, and Kevin was the brewmaster and production manager at Salt Lake City’s Uinta Brewing Company. Kevin, who has a brewing science degree from the University of California–Davis, often traveled to Bavaria to obtain equipment for Uinta. While there, he also explored historic farm and village breweries in northern Bavaria’s Franconia region. Photos of Franconia that Kevin sent to Jael reminded her of Coshocton County, but the wooly pigs in the photos really caught her eye. They had remarkably thick, sheep-like hair, and says Jael, “The mamas and their striped piglets looked so cute.” At the time, Aaron was at Fort Collins where his wife, Lauren Malenke, was studying to be a large-animal veterinarian at Colorado State. They researched the wooly pigs and identified the breed as Mangalitsa, a heritage line developed in Hungary in the 1800s. Although bred to be pasture-raised, wooly pigs are a natural for breweries because they’re partial to spent grain. “On Franconia’s farms,” notes Kevin, “breweries are always beside pig barns because they use the beer-making byproduct for feed.”
12 OHIO COOPERATIVE LIVING • JUNE 2021
