Two breweries worth a trip to former mill town LaGrange

Work is a happy grind in Vandegriffs’ historic gristmill in Helen.

2024-02-04 - Bob Townsend

Located 68 miles southwest of Atlanta on I-85, LaGrange once was known for mills and manufacturing. More recently, the city has been revitalized with a lively mix of restaurants, shops, galleries and a pair of travelworthy breweries.

Wild Leap Brew Co. opened downtown in 2017, transforming a former tire company space into a brewery and tasting room adjacent to an outdoor plaza that is the scene of a variety of events.

In 2022, co-founders Anthony Rodriguez and Rob Goldstein and Chief Brewing Officer Chris Elliot opened a second location at Centennial Yards in downtown Atlanta.

When I visited recently, Elliot said he supervises everything to do with brewing, including the design and recipes. “We have a 30-barrel BrewFab brewhouse,” he said. “In Atlanta, we have a five-barrel system and that’s where we do most of our experimental beers now.”

In addition to its core beers, including Local Gold blonde ale, Chance India pale ale and Superlager German-style pilsner, the taproom offers cocktails, slushes, ciders and several wines.

“We have a beer license, a distilling permit, and farm winery license,” Elliot said. “Slushes are the most popular thing that we have. We credit it for keeping us alive during COVID, and we kept all of our employees because of that.”

Beer Connoisseur magazine named Wild Leap its brewery of the year in 2021 and 2023.

Looking ahead, Elliot is excited about the upcoming festival season.

“We’ve been adding on with food truck spaces, and we have a ramp for tour buses to pull in,” he said.

Across town from Wild Leap, Beacon Brewery and Restaurant opened in 2018 in the historic Hillside area.

The space features four different areas, including an indoor taproom, a screened-in patio, an outdoor beer garden and a hideaway known as the Lounge, which doubles as an event space.

When I stopped in, founder and owner Chase Hudson showed off the newest, fanciest addition — Tutto Pepe, an Italian restaurant offering fresh pastas and Italian wines.

“There will be Czech sidepull faucets and we’ll be doing three Czech-style beers,” he said. “Everything in-house is our own beer, and we created an Italian pilsner for Tutto Pepe. We’re also planning to do some Italian grape ales, and we’ll get the juice and blend that with our beer in fermentation.”

Hudson and head brewer Dave Hash are passionate about using regional ingredients as much as possible, including malts from Riverbend Malt House in North Carolina.

I really liked the beer selection in the taproom, including the bright, refreshing Tutto Pepe, recently on draft at Brick Store Pub in Decatur. An American amber lager called Waves of Grain was both beautiful to behold and surprisingly crisp.

“We usually have eight to 12 beers on tap,” Hudson said. “We do have our own canning line. We’re trying to make sure that pretty much everything on the tap list is its own individual beer. So many breweries are making one beer, then adding fruit in 12 different ways just to build out the list. For the most part, everything has its own recipe and is purpose-created.”

There are many reasons to visit Helen, whether it’s panning for gold, shopping in the Bavarian village, stopping at local wineries or hiking. But anyone who loves cooking should consider a stop at Nora Mill Granary, just east of downtown Helen on the banks of the Chattahoochee River.

The granary is housed in a fourstory building, constructed in 1876 by John Martin, who came to mine for gold and decided to settle in the area, operating a gristmill before the town of Helen was established.

In the early 1900s, the building was purchased by Lamartine G. Hardman, governor of Georgia from 1927 to 1931, who named the mill in memory of his sister Nora.

The mill eventually stopped operating and the building sat vacant, but in the 1970s Ron Fain and family members leased the building. In the 1980s, they got the old mill running again. Today, Fain’s grandson, Joe Vandegriff, and his wife, Addi, run the day-to-day operations, with the help of their children, Beckham and Weslynn.

Step into the building and you step back in time. The walls are chinked siding, with no insulation. There’s no air conditioning and no plumbing.

The main room houses the original French buhr millstones, powered by the fast-flowing Chattahoochee. The walls are lined with shelves that hold the family’s line of grits, cornmeal and mixes — including for pancakes, waffles, biscuits and bread.

One of their bestsellers is Pioneer’s Porridge, a mix of white grits, yellow grits, cracked wheat and whole rice. It’s made from a recipe created by Fain and his daughter Joann Tarpley. The most recent addition to the granary’s products is seasoned fish-fry mix.

In addition to the original millstones, there’s an electric mill from the 1950s that can run from sunup to sundown, since it’s not dependent on water flow. A busy day might find the mill producing 1,200 to 1,400 pounds of grits.

“When we’re grinding, you can smell the corn,” Joe Vandegriff said. “You can feel the building shaking. You can see the corn being ground, and in 20 minutes it’s ready for you to purchase.”

At one time, the mill would grind anything that could be ground — wheat, buckwheat, rye, corn, it didn’t matter.

“Now, because of gluten allergies and cross-contamination issues, we only grind corn and we get our corn from a farm in southern Kentucky,” Vandegriff said.

He said they get the flours used in their mixes “from other places across the country that share our methods of old-school milling. Many times, we have bartered grits for their wheat or rye flours. The buckwheat comes from a mill in upstate New York, whose mill predates ours by maybe 50 years.”

Two more rooms in the building house a general store, where the shelves are packed with jams, jellies, cast-iron cookware, Speckle Ware dinnerware, molasses and hard candy. Another room houses steaming slow cookers that produce grits and porridge you can sample.

“I started working in the mill while in high school, weekends and after school,” Vandegriff said. “After a few years of college, I came back to the mill.”

Then longtime miller Tommy Martin retired, and Vandegriff took on that job.

“I hope one or both of our children will continue the business, that they get as excited about being here and get as much pleasure out of it as I do,” he said.