[title subtitle=”words: Marla Cantrell
Images: courtesy Liz Preston”][/title]
On a day when the sun is ruling the earth, I make my way from Fort Smith to Prestonrose Farm and Brewing Company in Paris, Arkansas. The trees are strikingly green for late summer, and the roadside stands are plush with tomatoes and green peppers and stalks of tasseled corn.
AR-22 curves and rises, before the road finally enters a valley. If you’re not paying attention, you might miss the turn that takes you off the main road and to the wooden sign that marks the spot where Prestonrose begins.
At the top of the gravel drive is the ten-acre homestead of Liz and Mike (who’s mostly known by his surname) Preston. Three days a week, for four hours a day, the doors open to Prestonrose Brewing Company that’s housed in an eighteen-by-twenty-foot metal building on their property. And on those three days, customers from as far away as Memphis and Tulsa stop by to sample the craft beer Liz makes and take more home to enjoy.
The brewery opened in February, and in five months’ time, Liz had sold a thousand gallons of beer with names like Tea and Biscuits, an extraordinary tea-infused beer, and Blu Wit that’s made with Arkansas blueberries. As she notes the accomplishment, she looks out past the brewery to the metal bones of the second greenhouse that will be completed in just a few weeks. When the cold weather comes—a nearly impossible thought on a day like this—the greenhouses will extend the growing season on this organic farm.
These ten acres, and the brewery that will one day move to the magnificent weathered old barn that sits several yards away, make up the dream that Liz and Mike had while they were living in California where Liz had spent most of her life. They knew they wanted to grow things as naturally as possible, and they wanted to open a brewery. They considered buying property in New York but decided against it.
Soon after, an ad on Craigslist caught Liz’s attention. There was a place for sale in Paris, Arkansas, that had once been farmed by a family named Rose. The Prestons came to see it, and everything they wanted was here. “We bought this homestead from the descendants of the Rose family that settled here, and we wanted them to know we didn’t want to change anything,” Liz says. “They used to be famous for their purple-hulled peas and sweet potatoes, and I grow flowers and herbs where Mama Maxine Rose kept her kitchen garden. Her husband, Houston, drove the school bus for years.
“We wanted to honor their history, and when we decided to name our company Prestonrose, using their last name with ours, they were tickled.”
Liz and Mike moved in January 2013. They saw this transition as their next great adventure. They were married nine years ago at high noon in a ghost town in Nevada. Liz’s dress was made from pieces of 100-year-old French lace. And their three-tiered cake was baked in a Dutch oven since there was no electricity. To feed the seventy-five people who attended, they roasted a pig. Later, they rode bicycles across Europe. They took cheese making classes together, and then a beer making class.
For Liz, Mike was a much-needed source of joy. She’d been a single mom, who’d worked long hours getting an education and then even longer hours at impressive jobs—she was once a molecular ecologist whose research took her as far away as the Netherlands, and often to Hawaii.
For Mike, a nuclear chemist, Liz was his superstar. Even now, talking about her beer making skills, or her expertise in the kitchen, he can’t stop describing how wonderful she is. “I’m a cook,” he says, “but she’s a chef. She makes her own tofu, makes the pasta for lasagna, cures the meat to make pastrami.” He smiles. “Sometimes I ask myself if there’s anything she can’t do.”
Liz is beaming. “How can you not love that?” she asks, the question already answered.
Four hawks loop across a patch of sky just outside the brewery. Neat rows of flowers and herbs stand beneath the bright sun in a garden that’s edged by sunflowers that came up on their own. Beyond, crops of peppers and black-eyed peas and okra ripen. What the Prestons don’t use will be sold, mostly at the Paris
Farmer’s Market that Liz helps organize.
Mike has been working in the fields, and he sits drinking one of Liz’s beers called Forty Pound Brown, a sweet, slightly hoppy double brown. The chilled glass fogs in the heat. On the tap nearby are Liberty Weiz, a German Hefeweizen brewed with Liberty hops, Another Pale, and Old School Cream Ale, an homage to the old-school cream ales of the Midwest and East Coast.
When they opened Prestonrose, the pair thought they’d have to take the beer to surrounding cities like Fort Smith, which is an hour away, to sell it. But from the first time they opened the doors, customers have shown up. They have regulars now who don’t mind the trip for craft beer that’s as good as Liz’s.
What Liz loves about the process is that it combines two things she adores: science and art. “Cooking and art were two of the things I was interested in early on. I got accepted to a design school in San Francisco, but I decided not to go. Science fed my intellectual curiosity, and my hobbies, like photography and cooking and art, fed my creativity.
“The science of fermentation is intertwined with art. It’s another alive thing helping you make what you want. It’s not fully controllable. You have to enter into a partnership; you’re asking the yeast to please make you some beer. You are providing the right conditions, from the temperature of the water to the temperature of the grain, and that’s the science of it. You’re doing your best to get the situation perfect, to tweak your recipes, but in the end, it’s a dance. And that’s the art. It takes a certain degree of creativity,” Liz says, “and faith.”
As for those recipes, Liz is always experimenting. This spring, she made a beer called Saison d’Angela, an old French farmhouse-style Saison that was fermented and finished with fresh strawberries. “She used five pounds of strawberries in the boil,” Mike says, “and then she dehydrated another twenty pounds of strawberries and added them to the fermenter. You might think that beer would taste like candy, but in the end, it was delicious but with just a little whiff of strawberries in the thirty gallons of beer.”
Across the way, Liz is growing hops for her beer making, a rarity in Arkansas. Hops do a lot of work in the beer making process, but
most know it as the ingredient that adds the “bitter” to the brew. She talks about the progress she and Mike have made since they moved here. She talks about how much they love Arkansas.
The brewery is open on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, for a total of twelve hours. Every weekend so far, they’ve sold out of the fifty gallons they have available. Liz keeps three to five beers on tap. Usually, that’s a pale, an IPA, a fruit or herb beer, and a brown and a porter or stout. Prestonrose offers tasting flights, and customers then buy beer in growlers to take home.
The menu changes every week, and already Liz is looking to autumn for inspiration. She’ll be brewing Elderberry Blonde, Peach Pale, Chamomile Brown, Espresso Cream Stout, and a few versions of chili pepper stouts and porters, that will be available after her peppers ripen and then dry out.
The combinations seem endless to Liz, and that’s part of the appeal. For most of her life, she’s been looking for that valley where creativity and science meet. She knew that when she found it, everything else would fall into place. Mike leans back in his chair as Liz talks, smiling so wide it seems as if it might hurt. Liz smiles back, her blue eyes bright. And all around them, birds call out, and a breeze picks up at last, ruffling the tops of the trees, lifting the petals on the flowers in the field, that Liz so carefully planted.
