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Fine Creek Brewing Co. in Powhatan hosts the fifth annual OktoberForest Fest on Sunday, Sept. 13. (Photo by Eileen Mellon)
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Gathering sassafras for the Allegheny Highlands Farmhouse Ale (Photo courtesy The Nature Conservancy)
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The Fine Creek Brewing Co. team on their foraging trip in the Allegheny Highlands (Photo courtesy The Nature Conservancy)
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The Fine Creek Brewing team collecting sassafras (Photo courtesy The Nature Conservancy)
We often move through a landscape without really noticing what is growing at our feet or above our heads. In Virginia, there is flowering eelgrass, moving with the current in coastal bays and estuaries. Native evergreen conifers, their needles stretching long and fine against the sky. Sassafras, aromatic and spicy, its leaves changing shape from one branch to the next.
These plants and the places where they’re found might seem a world away from the beer flowing from a stainless-steel tap inside a brewery, but for a small group of local brewers, these wild, seasonal and fleeting ingredients offer a different way of understanding the place they call home.
On Sunday, Sept. 13, Powhatan’s Fine Creek Brewing Co. will host the fifth annual OktoberForest Fest, an event held in partnership with the Virginia chapter of The Nature Conservancy. The festival brings together beers made with locally foraged ingredients gathered from TNC preserves, celebrating the plants, forests and waterways that shape the state. This year’s festival also falls during TNC’s 75th anniversary year.
For Fine Creek Head Brewer Brian Mandeville, who has been with the brewery since 2019, the project is about more than finding lesser-used ingredients to put in a kettle. It brings him closer to the kind of brewing he has always been drawn to: small-batch beer shaped by place, season and circumstance.
“A lot of these ingredients grow in the wild, and it’s like hops grow out in the wild, too,” he says. “It’s sort of just reimagining the potential of what beer can be, and letting that translate.”
Earlier this summer, Mandeville and the Fine Creek crew took a trip to the Allegheny Highlands and Warm Springs Mountain Preserve. They spent their days in the mountains gathering sassafras leaves. At night, they cooked over an open fire and slept in the same surroundings they had spent the day exploring.
There is something about looking closely at a place that changes one’s perspective. Mandeville compares it to learning a new word: once you know it, you suddenly can’t stop seeing it.
“I think wild plants are the same way. The second you learn to identify one, you’ll feel like it’s everywhere,” he says. “Beer can be this vehicle that gets people to think more critically about wild space and the plants that grow there and how important conservation work is, for us to even have clean water to make beer with.”
Mandeville’s relationship with sassafras extends back to his childhood. It was one of the first plants he learned to recognize, its almost playful leaves shifting between dinosaur footprints, mittens and more familiar leaf shapes — all growing from the same tree.
“I grew up with it as a plant that I look forward to seeing in the woods,” he says. “I had wanted to do a project with the leaves for quite some time.”
This is his third year brewing with sassafras leaves, an ingredient he says strikes a balance between being known and sparking curiosity.
Sassafras leaf (Photo courtesy The Nature Conservancy)
“We’re lucky, because sassafras sits on the edge of being a little exotic and foreign, but familiar enough,” he says. “The dialogue is so much easier when someone’s trying something and they’re like, ‘Oh, these are really cool flavors and aromas that feel somewhat familiar, but I’ve never had them this way.’”
Mandeville reminds imbibers that, despite being uncommon in beer, sassafras is hardly a new discovery. For centuries, Indigenous people have used sassafras leaves as an herb, spice and thickener in soups and stews, and dried leaves continue to find their way into dishes such as filé gumbo. Its roots and bark are steeped into teas, and it’s perhaps best known for giving root beer its spicy notes.
“This is an ingredient that people in this region, and further away even, have been using in their food and beverage for a really long time, and we’re just tapping into that,” Mandeville says. “We think of hops as the main flavor and aroma of beer, but it’s only in the more modern context of beer that hops became this dominant flavor and aroma ingredient.”
OktoberForest Fest gives Mandeville a chance to explore brewing that feels inseparable from its surroundings. Fine Creek sits in a bucolic pocket of Powhatan, a world away from the noise of the city.
“I’m really inspired a lot by farmhouse brewing traditions from around the world, and a lot of them rely so heavily on ingredients that aren’t hops and methods and tools that maybe are less conventional in modern brewing,” he says.
Much of beer’s history was dictated by place, and OktoberForest Fest harks back to a way of brewing that predates mass production.
“Brewers today often end up in this mindset of, ‘This is the way that beer is made.’ ... If you look into farmhouse brewing, especially, there is nothing that’s sacred,” Mandeville says. “There’s no rule that you can’t break. My approach has always been to honor and showcase the ingredient and tell the story of where that comes. I rely so heavily on the work of farmers, and in this case conservationists.”
To make the Allegheny Highlands Farmhouse Ale, Mandeville and his team use kveik, a family of yeast strains associated with Scandinavian and Norwegian brewing. Its expressive fruitiness complements the fruit-forward character of the sassafras, while Virginia-grown wheat gives the beer a rounded texture and a dry finish. The result is bright and refreshing, with fleeting notes of fresh ginger and lemon zest. The sassafras remains present without getting lost in the beer.
“I feel like there is a responsibility to show that ingredient off and not let the beer get in the way of that,” he says.
The beers on offer during the festival are a liquid map of the state’s diverse ecosystems. Selvedge Brewing in Charlottesville used red spruce tips foraged from Beartown Mountain for its Clinch Valley Nordic Ale. Upweller Beer Company in Sussex County turned to longleaf pine from Piney Grove Preserve for its Piney Grove IPA. Richmond’s Vasen Brewing Company took to the shallow coastal waters of the Virginia Coast Reserve, snorkeling for eelgrass to make its Barrier Island Gose. And bayberry and spicebush gathered from Virginia streams became the foundation for a Wetland Restoration lager brewed at Sojourn Fermentory in Suffolk.
For those who want to taste all five beers, OktoberForest Fest takes place from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Fine Creek Brewing, which recently took home Brewery of the Year honors at the 2026 Virginia Craft Beer Cup. Other participating guest breweries include Richmond’s Brainstorm Brewhouse, Blindhouse Beer Company from Roanoke, Heliotrope Brewery in Lexington, Mieza Blendery of Alexandria, Quattro Goombas Winery in Loudoun County and Charlottesville’s Random Row Brewing Co.
Together, the beers make Virginia’s wild places tangible — something to smell, taste and experience in a glass.
Mandeville says, “My hope is that this project will continue to encourage folks to kind of revisit what beer from a locality means and how it can reflect the landscapes that are there and kind of connect people to maybe things that they don’t always think about, and that are sometimes right in front of you.”
