Family taps into craft beer dream at Hopyard Brewery

WASHINGTON HOLLOW — Craft beer fans in northern Dutchess County have a new local haunt to add to their rotation.

The 40-acre Hopyard Brewery at Washington Hollow opened its doors last month on Route 82, joining a small but growing cluster of farm breweries and distilleries that have reshaped the region’s rural crossroads. This month, the brewery is offering house-brewed Oktoberfest beers, Apple Cider Donut Hard Cider and Pumpkin Ale.

Located at 4679 NY-82, the brewery is open Thursday to Sunday. Hopyard Brewery’s brewmaster is Michael Bucey, who bought the property after selling his diesel business in Pleasant Valley.

He fell in love with brewing in the 1990s, long before the craft beer industry had a foothold in the Hudson Valley. But loving beer and opening a brewery are two very different projects.

When the Hopyard property went up for sale, Bucey bought it with a contingency plan. “If the brewery didn’t work out, we were just going to put a house there,” he said. “But it had a great well on-site, and when we had the water tested, it came back perfect for beer.”

With the help of the neighboring Cary Institute, Bucey set about planting hops and apple trees. Hops take a few years to fully mature, and Bucey took that time to go through the painstaking process of getting business approvals. At one point, he was ready to give up. But his son Gage, newly enrolled in business school, expressed an interest in the brewery. So Bucey doubled down.
“It was about four years from when we purchased the property to opening,” he said. “And it was vacant for 12 years before that…it was really overgrown, and the house we reconstructed was basically falling down.”

Aside from the construction, Hopyard needed to jump through regulatory hoops to become an official New York State Farm Brewery. Sixty percent of its hops and other ingredients have to be grown in New York State. Bucey supplements his own from nearby Germantown and Hudson Valley Malts.

The rest of the family is involved, too. Bucey runs the brewery with his son; his wife, Kathy; and his in-laws.

Since opening, the brewery has begun building a calendar of programming, including live acoustic music sets and food trucks on weekend afternoons. There’s an artisanal pizza oven that cranks out pies on Thursday nights, and Bucey plans to build out a full outdoor kitchen by next year.