Farm Feast. Gin, brandy, wine, chicken, and duck eggs—all from our neighbors at Branchwater Farms. Tickets for the feast on July 19th are here.
Greater Hudson Promise Neighborhood. Please join us in the spirit of generosity on June 29th, as Chef David hosts a classic feast to benefit this wonderful organization. Tickets are still available here.
Congratulating our brilliant friend, artist, and master gardener Frances Palmer on her latest book, Life with Flowers. It’s a thorough, practical, and gorgeous guide to growing and arranging flowers in the vessels she creates. Order yours.
Strawberries and chamomile! Grieg Farms and Paffenroth Gardens! Our favorite dessert is here. Order our strawberry cobbler for two with chamomile ice cream, and sign up for Clare’s newsletter, The Best Bit, to receive the recipe, adapted for home.
When Kevin Pike and Robin Touchet bought their 100-acre farm in Milan back in 2014, distilling spirits wasn’t the obvious next step. They were simply two creative, hands-on people—both with backgrounds in wine—who wanted to create something of their own and raise their kids with a connection to the land. Cider, wine and cheese were in the early mix of possibilities. But after financing setbacks and several seasons observing and working with the land, what emerged was Branchwater Farms, a distillery known for its elegant, hyper-local gin, vermouth, fruit brandies and whiskey—made with intention, minimal waste, and a regenerative mindset that runs through every thread of their operation.
Branchwater Farms has been continuously farmed since the 1700s, most recently by three generations of women who used no pesticides or herbicides for over 40 years before Kevin and Robin purchased it. It’s apparent that land stewardship is at the heart of everything they’ve created since. Kevin dove deep into organic farming, Robin runs the animal side, and together they’ve figured out everything from cover crop rotations to when exactly to mash for the least energy use. Their ethos is crystal clear: do less harm, make great spirits, and stay small by choice. We sat down with Kevin and Robin to talk about their winding path from wine to distilling, the challenges of farming in the Hudson Valley, and why you’ll never see them scale for the sake of growth. Their gin is already a star in our Pine Plains Martini, but their story might be the real spirit worth savoring.
Subscribe to their newsletter to learn more about their regenerative practices, Fridays at the Farm and the workshops they’re hosting this summer!
Before bottling your first Branchwater Farms spirits, what did you learn from six years of financial setbacks and living on/with the land?
At the time, it was frustrating. Not knowing if we could secure the finances to build something here made it hard to see what was in front of us. But in retrospect, we always say it was a gift. It forced us to put our own plans on hold and allowed us to sit with the land, to observe it over several seasons and to get a better sense of what it was telling us. In that time we changed our business plan from planting apple orchards for cider production to growing grain for spirits and we are so grateful for that evolution of ideas.
Mimi Casteel’s visit in 2019 seems like a turning point. What did she help you discover about your land and how to care for it?
Mimi helped us understand what we were looking at, how to read the land better. She enabled us to see that our farm’s strength is its diversity, its mix of field, forest, and water, all interacting and influencing what and how we grow here. Mimi says “The work teaches you how to do the work” and we’ve come to embrace this iterative process of observation, creativity, and response calling for an open heart and an open mind.
The story of your distillery’s start—with help from Hans Reisetbauer, repurposed Christian Carl equipment, and a six-year delay—feels like kismet. How important was that mix of luck, persistence, and relationship in getting off the ground?
It was fundamental. We often say that having Hans help us was like “skipping the line” in terms of learning how to distill. And learning from the very best–someone with an unwavering commitment to quality and decades of experience and experimentation. When Hans agreed to work with us, he said it could either be as a behind-the-scenes consultant, or it could be a collaboration in which he would lend his name to our products–but only if we would commit to his exacting standards of quality. The choice was obvious for us. Having Hans’ retrofitted copper pot stills as the centerpiece of our distillery is a visual reminder every day of that commitment and of his friendship.
With cover crops, no-till drilling, rotational livestock, water reuse and fallow fields, your farm is built around regenerative cycles. What’s one closed-loop system you’re especially proud of?
A loop that is completely closed is electricity. The barn distillery uses normal power, low voltage and 3-phase, high voltage power to run the European motors. Our electrician still jokes that this was a job that almost killed him. We don’t have access to 3-phase power from our country road, so we needed to step up the voltage and convert from single to 3-phase on-site. This uses a tremendous amount of electricity, so we installed a large solar array on the roof of the barn, and we now produce three times more electricity than we use. But we are most proud of our water re-use. Like electricity, a distillery uses a lot of water. We’re fortunate to be in the Town of Milan where we have large underground water reserves. All the water we use here, from cooling the distillery to proofing the spirits before bottling, comes from our well. We designed the layout of the distillery to allow us to collect the water used to cool the distillery which we can then use to make another mash. So, we plan our day to distill in the morning and to collect that cooling water, which comes off the distillery at around 75 degrees Celsius (167 degrees Fahrenheit). Then, we only need to heat this water up to 90 degrees Celsius to make the next mash as opposed to starting with tap water temperature. This saves us a lot of energy heating up the water. What we don’t use for a mash is collected in IBC totes to be used for the animals. The remainder goes into a dry well and back into the water table.
Robin, you said you’d rather wash eggs by hand than automate the process, a symbol of what’s meaningful to you. What other small, deliberate choices have come to define how you work?
We keep a small flock of “yard birds,” laying hens that live in a coop in our backyard and completely free range around the farm. They are individuals and characters, more like pets, and they serve as a daily reminder of why I chose this way of life. Farming can desensitize you to certain things over time. I never want to approach animal husbandry from an efficiency-driven perspective. All of the animals we raise here deserve to be treated with dignity - whether raised for eggs, meat, fiber or sheer enjoyment.
Branchwater's ethos is rooted in doing less harm and staying small by choice. Why is that important to you?
We’ve seen the “bigger/more is better” mentality take root in our culture and we’ve also seen great start up businesses with amazing products go downhill once they scale up. We don’t want to participate in that model. We want to make artisanal products that we are proud to have our names attached to and that people may even drive out of their way to track down. When we process the fruit for our eaux de vie, we see and touch everything before it goes into the crushers and fermentation tanks. We hand-sort for quality because we don’t want any compromised fruit to negatively impact the final product. We believe it’s this kind of personalized attention to detail that gets lost in the “bigger is better” approach and we believe attention to detail and quality still matter.
Instead of scaling up, you’ve chosen to expand horizontally through collaborations and new spirits releases. With partners like Fix Bros., Row 7 Seeds and Rose Hill Farms, what defines a good collaboration for you?
Farming can be a rather solitary and isolating activity but it is also one that deeply benefits from the knowledge and experience of previous generations of farmers and farmers with specializations in certain areas. We find collaborations to be the most rewarding part of this work because we get to shine a spotlight on the heroic work of the true farmers in our community, as well as other artisanal producers. We don’t fully live on the work we do here but lots of farmers do and that comes with the risks and rewards of the seasons. For us, a good collaboration is seeing the value in working together to raise awareness, bringing people closer to agriculture through its myriad range of products. We think the table is always big enough for more guests and we love throwing a good party!
As founders and partners, how do you navigate the balance between creative vision, the daily realities of running a farm and distillery together, and time for each other and your family?
As it turns out, we are well-suited partners in life and in business and we feel pretty lucky about that! Our skills and strengths as individuals complement and dovetail with the other’s. We each have our own work sphere which we’ve carved out rather organically, but we overlap and help when needed. Kevin handles the grain farming and spirits production and Robin manages the farm store and livestock program. But Kevin helps with animal infrastructure and fencing projects and Robin helps out with fruit processing, bottling and labeling in the distillery. Our kids are now 19 and 17 and both are off to college in the fall. We realize that this farm and our family business have taken up a lot of our time, attention and energy while they were growing up. We have always honored the dinner table ritual every night; it’s a safe place for our family to share whatever is on our minds. We hope Rhys and Sylvie see value in what we’re building here and we hope they will always feel a connection to this land. But we also want them to follow their own dreams, whatever they may be and wherever they may lead.
You recently lost Kevin’s beloved Aunt Joyce who lived around the corner from the farm–what of her spirit lives on at Branchwater?
Her Midwestern values of hard work, being of service to others and tending a garden
What’s the best piece of advice you were given while creating Branchwater?
To use the same bottle shape for all of the spirits for brand identity. We purchase our bottles from a glass manufacturer in Germany, and originally we had planned one shape for the whiskeys, another for gin, and another for the eaux de vie. But by using one shape, we saved a lot of money and space on bottles and cartons.
Your last month in a word: SPRING
During a long day, what rituals bring you joy or keep you grounded?
Robin: Collecting eggs. Kevin: Preparing dinner
Always: Seasonal
Never: Vodka
Friends are coming over this summer–what’s your go-to Branchwater Spirits cocktail?
The Branch-tini of course! It’s the little sister to the Pine Plains Martini at Stissing House.
Branchwater Gin, Branchwater Dry Vermouth, simple syrup, orange bitters and an orange twist. Fancy coupe, pinkies up - cheers!