When I initially tried @foxfarmbeer , I thought that they were a Connecticut brewery that made a fascinating barleywine. What I have come to realize since then is that they are an extremely competent clean brewery, that also happens to have a weird barleywine.

The gestalt of what FFB does lies in crispness. There’s a degree of refreshment and precision to all of their beers. The altbier is eerily historically accurate, their hopgame is gentle and errs on the side of delicacy, their pilsner, as expected is a lithe water cracker and Bermuda grass affair tailored for guys in Sperrys and women in Free People sun dresses with floppy hats doling out microagressions at brunch. They transplanted, still imbibe. It’s clean cut, toe to tip.

If OEC is the wacky experimental vampire laboratory, Fox Farm is a Salem witch traditionalist executing things like a refreshing classic recipe pressed in the pages of a timeworn cookbook your grandmother handed down to you. Pebble is endemic of this. Table bier, bier du pays, petite saison: call it what you want, it is crushable WLP 565 juice. Like the frictionless spotwelds on an aircraft, the lines between saccharomyces and brett are tightly wound.

One part lime Perrier, another part Lemon Powerade, it has the crispness of fresh semianiline leather in a BMW X5, but you know it is generational wealth. Connecticut things. The swallow is succinct and offers a terse casaba melon with honeydew. The acidity is almost non-existent for a mixed ferm beer and I imagine them having difficulty outright dumbing this down as a “sour” for the ruby-joweled boomers in Titleist hats darkening their doorway.

You can kill the entire bottle, you can share it, it is inoffensive, it is $10, you can waste it, with elegant packaging you can gift it to Crystal in accounts receivable whose hair always appears to be wet for some reason. In being so approachable, it can be loved by all and overlooked in turn for the same reasons. It is a farmhouse Rachel Leigh Cook with paintsplattered saison overalls, hair in a messy bun. OH NO WAY WAIT TABLE BEERS ARE LOW KEY HOT.