Gimme Some Sugar
Just down the road, an imaginative escape at Sugar Farms’ Istrouma Brewery
On perhaps one of South Louisiana’s most gorgeous days of this godforsaken year, the four members of the Country Roads editorial team convened in the little river town of St. Gabriel. Though it’s just enough off the beaten path to convince someone they’ve wandered far, far from home, Sugar Farms is only a twenty-minute drive from our Baton Rouge office. Of course, in this year’s move to work-from-home, it’s become increasingly rare for the four of us to gather in person at all, and on this afternoon we each made around an hour’s drive from our respective home offices in St. Francisville, New Orleans, Mandeville, and Scott.
“We loved telling stories together through our art and our film and television projects. We wanted our children to have the space to create their own little stories.” —John Haynes
The occasion, or perhaps excuse, for our Thursday afternoon reunion was the opening of the region’s newest brewery: John and Joanna Haynes’ Istrouma Brewing. Creative brews made with locally-sourced ingredients we expected—this is hardly our first microbrewery feature. But the longhorns were a bit of a surprise.
“We wanted our children to grow up on a gravel road,” said John, a Baton Rouge native best known for his work as a nationally-renowned contemporary painter. With his wife Joanna, he also founded Wish Picture Shows, producing several documentary films, including a feature (narrated by Trace Adkins) on the 1960s boxing champion Billy ‘The Kid’ Roth called The Dance (2003) and Ole War Skule: The Story of Saturday Night (2011), which details the history of the LSU Football experience. Together, they also created a Louisiana children’s multi-media platform called The Gumbo Gang on Boogie Bayou, which uses animation, television, and video games to educate on nutrition and exercise.
[Read Managing Editor Jordan LaHaye Fontenot's story about Wild Child Wines in Acadiana, here.]
“We loved telling stories together through our art and our film and television projects,” said John. “We wanted our children to have the space to create their own little stories.”
Moving to Sugar Farms ten years ago was a dream fulfilled for the couple. Since the move, John’s paintings, which have been described as “more like memories of a place, a sound, or motion,” have shifted in subject matter from motifs of clotheslines, ceiling fans, and pianos to tractors, chickens, oil rigs, and—naturally—longhorns.
“When you’re walking through the farm, you hear the cows and horses hollerin’ at ya, saying ‘feed me!’” John described, “It takes the blood pressure down.” The couple also keeps a pen of goats and sheep, visible from the brewery’s courtyard atop a three-story playground.
“Growing up in our families, when we get a lot of love and kisses, we call it sugar,” he explained. “People think sugar cane, but it’s really just some lovin’.”
Though the farm does reside in the heart of sugarcane country, less than five miles away from the LSU Audubon Sugar Institute, John’s focus is primarily on raising livestock, and the name comes from a place more sentimental than strategic. “Growing up in our families, when we get a lot of love and kisses, we call it sugar,” he explained. “People think sugar cane, but it’s really just some lovin’.”
The brewery was born as a combination of John’s interest in home-brewing and cuisine, and the couple’s desire to share their beautiful property with others. “We wanted this to be a place where people can create their own stories,” he said. Officially opened on October 16, the Sugar Farms complex includes the Feed & Seed eatery, a farm-to-table pizza and taco kitchen operating out of a 1955 Spartan Royal Mansion trailor; the Cattle Drive-In “Moovie” Theatre, which debuted with a showing of Dracula (1931) on its thirty-foot screen on Halloween; and of course the Istrouma Brewing Company, a family-friendly taproom and courtyard scattered with local art, antiques, and yard games.
[Visiting St. Gabriel? Read about the little river town's history, here.]
“We feel that we have created an ‘art farm,’” said John. “The arts take place in many ways—painting, photography, film, food, beer.” With bocce, a life-sized chess board, Connect Four, a ping pong table, a couple of screens to check the local scores, and a Bark Park, Sugar Farms—John emphasized—is meant to be a place for “kids of all ages.”
A heavy beer, it holds a semi-sweet bite of liquor that also somehow lightens it, and even leaves room in the belly for another if one is so inclined.
As for the four kids aged twenty-three to fifty-one sitting out in the courtyard that Thursday night—after ogling a piano-turned-table with five vintage barber’s chairs as seating and the clarinets used as light fixtures—we were ready to get our hands on the beer. Three of us started with sours, my cohorts ordering the POG (standing for Passionfruit, Orange, and Guava) and the Lena Lei, which features hints of mango and hibiscus from Lena Farms in Clinton. As for myself, I went with the fresh and fizzy blackberry sour still brewing in the back. A fabulous fandango shade of purple, it possesses the perfect balance of tang and fruitiness, without veering off into the land of the sweets. I’ll drink a sour any day, but with the teasing cooler temperatures of the early November clime, I craved something darker next—opting for the Bourbon Barrel-Aged Black Ale. A heavy beer, it holds a semi-sweet bite of liquor that also somehow lightens it, and even leaves room in the belly for another if one is so inclined. Compelled to get as complete a sense of the menu as I could without risking my hour-drive home though, I finished off with the Frozen Strawbierita, which is made with Istrouma’s Margarita Gose blended with fresh strawberries and coconut cream. The gose, John said, is made from a really special salt that he and Joanna came across while traveling the year before. “This salt is one of the most pristine salts in the world,” he said. “It’s an Egyptian salt mined out of the desert, and packed on camels to deliver it to the factories.”
[Read Chris Turner Neal's article on Mississippi Gulf Coast breweries here.]
Using such exotic ingredients has been fun for the Hayneses, and part of their larger missions to create beer with the palate at the forefront and to foster storytelling in everything they do. However, using locally-sourced ingredients—they hope someday exclusively—is the number one priority. Right now, both the blonde and bragget use honey from a farmer right down the road. The figgy strong ale gets most of its weight from locally-grown figs—preserved with Grandpa Blue’s recipe—and Louisiana citrus is the secret to the frozen lemonade. On the pizzas, the verdant piles of greens, mushrooms, and edible flowers all come from nearby farmers, and someday, John hopes to source his own cheese from his growing playground-climbing dairy herd. At our table the pizza crust sparked a series of full-mouthed “oohs” and “ahhs,” explained later when John told us it is made with their honey blonde brew and cooked in a cast iron pan.
“We really have a focus on flavor no matter what we are doing,” he said. “Not looking at the cost of the product. We look at it the other way. We want the right ingredients to hit the right flavors, then we figure out how to make that work. And using those farm ingredients, local products, as much as possible, then making as much from scratch as we can—all these things roll into one really great formula.”
...sharing an escape of an evening in a space made magical by the charm of café lights and children playing life-sized chess and the occasional goat’s bleat—well, it’s the very kind of connection to place and people that has always brought us storytellers to tell stories at all.
Being four editorially-minded people, it’s not hard to get us into a mode of storytelling, particularly when you add in the fact that we all quite miss each other’s company. But each of us three beers in, tastebuds dancing between hops and various combinations of cheese, bread, and “Butt and Belly al pastor,” sharing an escape of an evening in a space made magical by the charm of café lights and children playing life-sized chess and the occasional goat’s bleat—well, it’s the very kind of connection to place and people that has always brought us storytellers to tell stories at all.