Wooly Pig Brewery (Fresno, Ohio)

Thinking of warmer, greener, milder times now that we’re getting into the cold and windy Ohio winter has me reminiscing about Wooly Pig Brewery’s Oktoberfest from this past Fall. Tucked into the hills of Central Ohio, it’s a small, modest farm specializing in brewing German style beers and raising heritage Mangalitsa Wooly Pigs. It’s a bit of a drive out from Columbus and I make it a point to swing by if we’re ever in the neighborhood. For this occasion however, we drove out to the farm early, mainly so I could get a couple mugs of their Festbier being served out of a wooden keg before supplies ran out. We arrived just in time before a couple of buses and a motorcycle club pulled up by the time we got our provisions and seating. A local BBQ food truck was serving up an Oktoberbest special along with their usual menu, though I went with the special along with a couple sides of a pretzel with mustard and cooked apples.

I grew up around tall hills and rolling green pastures on a farm, every visit out to Wooly Pig tends to feel a little like home somehow. Not so much a standard brewery as it is a farm that makes beer, it has the old world feel from Germany of being the beer supplier and biergarten for a small town. There’s no loud music, it’s remote and off the path enough to hear no traffic, and on a lovely warm day like it was when I last visited, you can end up spending a couple hours just basking in the sun, drinking a couple liters.

Their beers aren’t distributed outside the brewery, so getting out to the source is the only place to get them!

Beers Featured:

Wooly Pig Festbier

Find out more about Wooly Pig at their website: https://www.woolypigfarmbrewery.com/