Branchwater Farms

05/22/2026

We love the month of May and our dear friend and hostess of Fridays at the Farm with the mostest thought it would be fun to throw a themed party. Can you all use a party too?!

Please join us for Fridays at the Farm: British Invasion / Jam Fest Edition!
Friday, May 29th (4-7pm)

We will be joined by two very talented UK-born artists now living in New York State — one who expresses her creativity through amazing culinary creations, and one who does so through vinyl.

Mimi Beaven — baker and maker of extraordinary skill will be here with an array of her jams and baked goods. Her jams and jellies are all hand-made in small batches with the highest quality locally grown or home grown fruit. She will also have cookies, scones focaccia and her highly addictive granola available for purchase. You can place your pre-orders here or cross fingers you get here before it’s all gone!

DJ Misbehaviour — passionate collector of vinyl with eclectic taste, London-born Trish Mann bought her first record at the age of 9. Spinning under the name DJ Misbehaviour, she will be putting us all in the mood to groove with disco, soul and hip hop tunes. Put on those boogie shoes, and be warned: you may be going home sweaty!

We’ll be serving up cocktails and offering a selection of New York State wines, ciders, and beers. Plenty of nonalcoholic options too! Specialty food boards will also be available for purchase, featuring jams and focaccia from Mimi, and you can shop our farm store for local provisions as well.

If you’re not up for dancing, you can pull up a chair and meet your neighbors or chill in the lower field with our flock of ducks. Bring a book or your current knitting project. It’s Friday - come get your weekend off to a great start at the farm!

*Pets are not permitted inside the distillery and must be leashed at all times when at the farm.

05/21/2026

Labeling more of our Rye today and thought we’d pop in to share what makes ours unique. 

• Firstly, we grow it here, in rotation with wheat, cover crops and animals on 24 acres of fields which were previously cut for hay. 

• We don’t have a mash bill. Just as with our eaux de vie, the contents of our whiskeys are 100% what is shown on the label. 

• We make lower quantity in favor of higher quality. Our whiskeys are distilled at an average of 84% alcohol by volume, making for a much smoother alcohol once aged and proofed. Even though our Rye meets the requirement for a Straight Rye designation (aged 2 years in barrel), we can’t use that term because the government requires distillation at 80% by volume or less, which is the industry standard. Some distilleries brag about their cask strength whiskeys which are typically between 54-58% ABV. We water down to over 70% when going into barrel. 

This 2nd bottling of farm-grown Danko Rye was made in 2021 and left to age for over 3 years in 200-liter barrels (with staves that were aged for over 4 years) and (with staves aged for over 5 years) from Minnesota and Missouri forests. 

We bottle, label and number every spirit we produce by hand here at the distillery. We like having control over every step of production. We are uncompromising when it comes to quality and we hope that translates into every spirit we put out into the world.

Cheers!
Kevin & Robin

05/03/2026

Cover Crops are planted in the spring in the fields just vacated by animals. It is important to plant different families of cover crops.

“Every plant exudes its own unique blend of sugars, enzymes, phenols, amino acids, nucleic acids, auxins, gibberellins and other biological compounds, many of which act as signals to soil microbes. Root exudates vary continuously over time, depending on the plant’s immediate requirements. The greater the diversity of plants, the greater the diversity of microbes and the more robust the soil ecosystem.”
Dr. Christine Jones, “Light Farming”

We plant a mixture of oats, buckwheat, peas, red clover and sunflowers.

Oats (Poaceae family, grass) support mycorrhizal fungi, and when buckwheat (Polygonaceae family, knotweed) is planted with peas (Fabaceae family, legumes), the pea produces more nitrogen because it senses that the buckwheat is robbing it. Sunflowers (Asteraceae family) are planted for biodiversity, biomass and joy.

05/01/2026

Once you have lost a being you love fiercely, you begin to mourn those you love, even while they thrive. Loss is inevitable on a farm. But how do you carve out time to grieve? There is still so much requiring your energy, so many heartbeats still requiring your care. You can’t crawl under the covers and disappear even though that’s what you want to do. 

Gracie came to us two years ago via a local breeder who got her from Vermont. She was a direct descendant to one of the first Shetland ewe imports from Canada, Dailley Samaia. 

She was the undisputed leader of our little flock of five, the matriarch. 
She had a feral beauty with wild eyes. She had a stubborn streak and could be a bit snarky at times. She was also fearless and didn’t take crap from anyone—whether shearer or sheepdog. 
She was the first one to befriend me and always welcomed chin and back rubs.

She left us very suddenly and very unexpectedly on Monday morning. Her loss is deeply felt.

04/22/2026

Our logo is based on a Tree of Life trivet, one of the many collected by Kevin’s maternal grandmother.

The Tree of Life is a universal, ancient symbol representing the interconnectedness of all life, personal growth, strength, and the cycle of life, death, and rebirth.

We chose it as our logo because it’s stylized enough to suggest a head of wheat or a spreading apple tree. It represents the growth and renewal we are cultivating day by day here in the Hudson Valley.

Earth Day Every Day

04/16/2026

Join us at the farm on Sun, May 10th (aka Mothers Day) from 11am-3pm for FEMMERGY—a celebration of female creativity.

Skip those $30 Eggs Benedict for Mother’s Day brunch or—if that’s your thing—swing by the farm afterwards for a celebration of women and their creative strength and nurturing wisdom. We will be mixing up Bloody Mary’s and raising money in support of the critical work of Planned Parenthood and we will be joined by several inspiring women that help to make our community the vibrant and supportive one that it is.

Northern Dutchess Botanical Gardens our amazing neighbors just up the road on Salisbury will be popping up with a plant sale. Marcella has been busy growing beautiful babies for you to take home to your gardens.

Our very talented neighbor Diane Moroff will be joining us, with a selection of her beautiful collages, as well as puzzles and cards of her artwork.

Judy from Longview Linens has been sewing up a storm. Her business tagline is “Life is Better with Linen” and we couldn’t agree more! Her tea towels and napkins make the perfect gifts (for moms and other people!)

The genius behind the Branchwater Gin Goat Milk Soap we sell in our store, Jade of Cats’ View Farm will be here with daughter Adele selling an array of delicious soaps and lotions.

Our beloved friend and local crafter Jacqui Rose will be leading a “Handwork for the Warmer Months” workshop from 11am-noon for the first ten people to sign up. Jacqui will supply all the necessary materials. Please consider a donation to Planned Parenthood in exchange.

And what celebration would be complete without Catarina of Little Rye Bakehouse’s addictive creations? Expect some quiche action, probably some savory croissants too. We told you to skip the overpriced brunch!

See you on May 10th for some farm fun and creative energy!

04/11/2026

Spring is here and the calendar tells us we’d better get with the program because we’ve got some events coming up soon! So let’s talk “Fridays at the Farm” for a sec. 

We started the FATF series 2 years ago to highlight the diversity of the spirits we produce here, showcasing them in a range of cocktails. Most people are familiar with gin and whiskey, which we make, but eaux-de-vie are a little more obscure and we get asked a lot how to use them in cocktails so we decided to provide some answers. 

What to expect if you come to a Fridays at the Farm? A very casual setting (think farm!), with interesting beverage options, a range of specialty food boards (oftentimes caviar service), your neighbors, maybe some new friends, birdsong, a good start to your weekend. We started the series as an experiment. You’re the ones who encouraged us to keep doing it so here’s to year 3 of Fridays at the Farm! Final Friday of the month April-October running 4-7pm. We look forward to sharing some good times with you!

04/07/2026

03/25/2026

Hi! We’ve never officially introduced ourselves, and since some of you may have started following us after buying our products in the wild, or through other accounts we thought it might be time. We are Robin Touchet and Kevin Pike and we are the people behind Branchwater Farms. We met almost 20 years ago in the wine business. (Where Kevin remains today, through his wine import company ).  We became good friends and the next thing we knew we were tying the knot under an oak tree on a farm we had just closed on in the Hudson Valley. 

We started Branchwater in 2014 with the desire to raise our kids on a farm. Both of us had a parent who grew up on a farm and our happiest childhood memories were spent on those farms. 

We definitely romanticized that life a bit! This farm is the best and also the hardest thing we’ve ever taken on. But not a day passes that we are not deeply grateful for this opportunity to live so intimately with a place, a landscape.  

Our focus at Branchwater is to leave the land we steward better than we found it. In exchange, we ask the land to provide for us. As a working farm we grow heritage grains for distillation and cover crops for soil health, and we raise chickens, ducks, sheep and goats for soil improvement, eggs, meat, fiber and entertainment. 

In the distillery, we produce gins and whiskeys from the wheat and rye we grow on the farm, using organic and regenerative farming principles. We source fruit from New York State growers for a range of fruit eaux de vie (and we have expanded to veggies too!) and we produce Vermouths as well. 

We operate a farm-store and tasting room Thursdays-Sundays 12-5 where we offer tasting flights of our spirits and an opportunity to stock up on local provisions as well as beer, cider, wine and spirits. It’s likely the only place you will see us between April and December since we don’t get off-farm very often in the busier months. 

We are a two-person team, but we couldn’t do this work alone. We’re grateful for our friends, community and customers who show up to help and to support the work we do. Thanks for coming to our TED talk!

03/24/2026

Save the Date! This Mother’s Day, Sunday, May 10th we will be hosting an event in celebration of female creativity: FEMMERGY

We will be mixing up Bloody Marys and raising money in support of the critical work done by . We will be joined by local artists and makers and are planning some workshops too. will be popping up with a plant sale! Food will be a thing too of course. We can’t wait to share more details but in the meantime we wanted you to know you have an alternative to Mother’s Day brunch with overpriced Eggs Benedict.

SUNDAY, MAY 10th (11-3) at BRANCHWATER