Jennings, Lain and Van Carney grew up in Rappahannock County, where if you look west, the horizon’s underlined by the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Their parents were inclined toward folk music and blues, and a few of their uncles were devoted to jazz. The brothers also played music while still in high school. Jennings, the eldest, eventually moved to Colorado where, the bassist said, he bummed around ski slopes for a while. But when Lain matriculated to a Baltimore-area college in 2003, the siblings reconvened in Maryland and formed the band Pontiak — a psych-adjacent rock act that between 2006 and 2017 released 8 full-length recordings and a handful of singles and EPs.
The group most recently toured Europe in 2023, following a pandemic-prompted hiatus. But beginning 10 years ago, the Carney brothers embarked on a different collaboration: Pen Druid Fermentation, a Sperryville brewery that each sibling can get to in about five minutes from their homes. To mark a decade of work, they’ll be serving up a pair of special-release beers at the rural outpost.
The brewery’s an extension of the trio’s collaborative life, each sibling relied upon by the others for certain tasks. But it’s possible that without being on the road in Pontiak, Pen Druid wouldn’t have sprung to life.
When the ensemble began, it was ensconced in a Baltimore music scene that rippled with variety and depth. Beach House, Future Islands and Dan Deacon had begun to establish themselves before hitting on national renown. And older bands, like the Dischord Records group Lungfish, were still kicking around.
The Carneys issued a pair of albums in 2006 and 2007 through their own Fire Proof Records, before cementing a relationship with Thrill Jockey, an adventurous Chicago label with releases spanning free jazz and psychedelia.
“Thrill Jockey is instrumental to this whole story,” Jennings Carney said recently, discussing the group’s trajectory. “[Label founder] Bettina Richards is visionary, she's amazing, she’s a force of nature and I love her.”
“Maker,” the group’s first long-player on the imprint, continued Pontiak’s investigation of noisy avant-garde rock, while also slotting in folksier offerings, like “Seminal Shining.” “Suzerain,” from the group's 2009 “Sea Voids” pushed into metal territory, and a few years later, on “INNOCENCE,” the tune “Ghosts” hinted at krautrock tendencies while continuing to honor hard rock and various strains of metal.
The array of influences confounded critics at the time and resulted in some luke-warm reviews.
Chris Richards, The Washington Post’s pop music critic, has covered performers as diverse as Doechii and Liturgy. He said Pontiak benefited from “sibling telepathy,” as well as Baltimore serving as an incubator for new ideas.
“I remember their music feeling cool and exciting and entrancing, but I think with sort of the riff-centric rock that they play, it ultimately sounded committed,” Richards recalled, speaking to Radio IQ from his D.C. home. “Those jammy, repetitive doom-metal riffs, I think people like to interpret them [as] sort of hypnotic, but I think that they're more implicit of commitment and perseverance.”
Getting hooked up with an internationally known label offered a new level of visibility for the group, setting the Carneys off on a spate of international tours. And during those European trips, the group’s sound engineer, Tyler Trotter, directed the siblings toward notable breweries as they shuffled between cities.
“We got to see the breadth of the traditional beers of Europe, and it really laid a very solid foundation,” Carney said, describing the impact of his travels with the band.
The brothers funneled the alchemy they found on stage into Pen Druid, specializing in spontaneous and native yeast fermentation — processes others sometimes refer to as wild fermentation.
Carney makes the distinction by describing their domestication of a yeast native to the Commonwealth that Pen Druid’s used as the basis of its brewing operation. It’s not just random happenstance, he said, it’s an exacting aesthetic desire to create beverages specific to Virginia, while making use of local honey, apples, plums and a variety of other crops sourced from the region.
Similar brewing methods incubated in Europe for hundreds of years, but aren’t as common in the States. And while IPAs and sour beers have become legion during the past 10 to 15 years, Pen Druid’s focus remains something of an outlier.
Brett Taubman, director of the fermentation sciences program at Appalachian State University in North Carolina, said IPAs helped prime Americans for more adventurous fare.
“In the early ’90s, when craft beer was just taking off, I think the American palette at that time was just beginning to mature,” he said. “It took a little bit of time to evolve that more sort of bitter palette. And that's where you saw a lot of West Coast IPAs, really gaining traction throughout the ’90s and early 2000s.”
As with their band, Carney said he aims for consistency at Pen Druid.
“Let's be systematic and let's go about that in a way that I can look back 10 years in, and go, ‘What do my notes say? How did I ferment that? What temperature did I ferment it?” he said.
Pen Druid isn’t likely to be found at corner stores or on tap at most bars in Virginia. And Carney’s not interested in expanding distribution. His goal is to bring people to Sperryville and to foster community at the brewery.
“This is what I'm doing with the rest of my life, which is, like, I'm brewing, I'm writing music, I'm climbing, I'm skiing and I'm traveling,” Carney said.
Nationally, 2024 was the first year in the past two decades that more craft breweries closed than opened. And in Virginia, the number of breweries decreased from 2023 to 2024, even as production increased, according to the Virginia Craft Brewers Guild.
But Pen Druid’s continued to grow, Carney said, because of how specialized it is. He sees the business as an enduring artistic collaboration that can be passed along to a new generation, despite industry headwinds.
“We have our vision,” Carney said, reflecting on a decade of work at Pen Druid. “We have our goal and we just stick to it.”
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.