Photos by Little Outdoor Giants

In almost every corner of Homefield Kitchen and Brewery in Sturbridge, Mason jars abound in fridges and freezers, on shelves and tables, each one protecting and preserving food. For months, Homefield’s owners, Jonathan Cook and Suzanne LePage, have measured time by the contents of these Mason jars: pickled vegetables, fermented teas, fresh beer and potent vinegar. At times, too, they have felt sealed away in their now cluttered, peopleless taproom.

The pre-COVID Homefield, the crowded bar with its revolving door of musicians, exists today only as a pleasant memory. The brewery and kitchen in Sturbridge may never return to those days. “There’s no model I could find, no way to get it done, where it would be worth our time and not a real taint on the authentic experience that we had,” Cook says. “It would be making fake memories. You’d be in an enfeebled Homefield.”

That doesn’t mean Cook and LePage have abandoned their mission of building a conduit for local farmers and connecting people with their food. They enter this winter stocked with the food they have preserved over the spring and summer, transforming it into soups, sauces, kombuchas and pickles. With it, they’ll build new meals for Homefield’s ever-evolving takeout menu. And Cook has not stopped brewing beer; he expects to swap the Mason jars for cans soon.

A recent menu offers dishes built with fresh ingredients from Massachusetts farms, made with well-preserved sauces, fruits and vegetables plucked from Homefield’s growing store: a barbecue meal with smoked chicken from Red River Farm in West Brookfield and Homefield’s house barbecue sauce and pickled watermelon rind and dilly beans; a grilled cheese sandwich topped with smoked bluefish pâté; a shiitake mushroom miso soup—the mushrooms from Westhampton, the miso from Shelburne Falls.

LePage, who also teaches in Worcester Polytechnic Institute’s civil and environmental engineering department, says the pandemic has highlighted serious shortcomings with how the region stores, processes and distributes food.

“We would go to our normal suppliers, especially for meat, and the freezers were empty because everybody flocked to them,” she says. “The blockage in the supply chain starts at the processing facilities, especially the ones we’re working with—humane, local facilities, and there aren’t many in our region.”

A more-than-two-hour Zoom conference they attended on the region’s food equity issues and its processing and distribution woes shed more light on what Homefield could do to both keep the lights on and aid its network of local farmers. “What kind of came out of it were the two big things that we’re lacking in New England if we’re really going to be able to feed ourselves: food processing and food storage,” she says. “So, a couple weeks later we said, ‘Let’s buy some freezers.’”

Homefield’s takeout business, including delivery to Worcester, has ebbed and flowed, but Cook and LePage stay busy by catering on the side. They partnered with Farmer at the Door, a local small business that delivers food from farms, giving founder Lauren Parente the space in the taproom where the musicians once played. They strengthened their bond with fellow Sturbridge brewer Rapscallion, which will open a new taproom in the space above their tiny quarters.

Homefield has been far from stagnant since closing its taproom. Cook and LePage prefer not to project too far into the future, though. “In March or April, I want to have empty freezers and be very excited for the spring crops,” says LePage.

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This story appeared in the Winter 2021 issue.