REPORT // REVIVING HERITAGE GRAINS
Stills in the Hills
Pennsylvania’s new Whiskey Rebellion
by Brian D. Leaf
EXCERPT //
Laura Fields is a straight shooter. “Everybody likes talking about amber waves of grain,” she says. “And, you know, I love driving through the cornfields and all that BS. But in truth, you have got to find a way to apply these grains to something that people connect to.”
Fields grew up in Freehold, New Jersey, where—she pointed out to me—Bruce Springsteen is from. Her mother also had a farm at the second-highest point in Lehigh County, PA, where the younger Fields watched farming communities disappear and wondered how to make people care about the land.
While her mother ran a nonprofit that conducted education for kids, Fields saw that adults would be checked out and did not care about local agriculture.
As a lover of whiskey—a spirit with a healthy amount of its own BS lurking about its history—she quickly realized that distilled spirits would be the hook for building a bridge across generations.
While milking goats might entertain the kids, it is that oak-aged spirit that catches people’s interest. So when she formally established the innocuous-sounding Delaware Valley Fields Foundation in 2015, it already had whiskey encoded in its DNA.
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