MONROE — When Farm Aid comes to Wisconsin Sept. 21 for a sold-out show at Alpine Valley Music Theatre with Willie Nelson, Bonnie Raitt, Neil Young and Dave Matthews Band, both the featured sponsor beers available for sale at concessions will be from Green County: perennial favorite New Glarus Brewing and newcomer Cheese City Beer.

The Cheese City Beer motto — “No Farmers, No Beer” — aligns with Farm Aid’s goal since the first festival in 1985 to raise awareness and funds to help family farms in crisis.

Cheese City Beer’s Jeremy Beach develops and sells beer brewed from ingredients sourced entirely from his family’s fifth-generation farm off Honey Creek Road southwest of Monroe. He started the company in 2016.

“In the beer world, we’re as family as you can get,” said Beach, 35, a 2002 Monroe High School graduate. He grows the ingredients for Cheese City Beer on just over five acres he rents from his 99-year-old grandpa, Duane Beach.

Beach plans to debut an “easy drinking” cream ale, Agriculture Ale, at Farm Aid. Like all his beers, it will be sold at retailers in the area, including locally at Monroe Beverage Mart.

Cheese City Beer is a beverage sponsor of Farm Aid. Beach said he made a $5,000 contribution to the nonprofit organization, and in exchange, his beer will get more visibility to festival goers.

Glenda Yoder, associate director of Farm Aid, said the organization’s commitment to including local craft breweries in festival concessions is related to a broader effort, since 2007, to serve a menu sourced from local farmers wherever the annual Farm Aid festival is held.

“We change the purchasing practices for that day” at the venue, she said. “That’s part of the effect we want to have with Farm Aid — to boost the local (farm economy).”

Beach’s Cheese City Beer is a natural fit in this effort.

“He’s showing the capacity of value-added,” Yoder said. “Beer is pretty complex, and the opportunity to put together beer from everything that you’ve grown is really remarkable and a wonderful ambition.”

Earlier this summer Beach released a watermelon blonde ale named N1671 Estate Ale, after his farm’s address. All the ingredients came from the farm, even the water. Beach said he and his family transported “big totes filled out with a garden hose” from the farm to the facility where Cheese City Beer is currently brewed, Brewfinity Brewing Company in Oconomowoc.

It’s good well water and higher in calcium, according to his father.

“We have limestone underlying all of this,” Paul Beach said, standing on the land the family has farmed since 1901. His son’s ingredient-sourcing “wouldn’t be practical for Budweiser,” but it’s doable for small batches of beer.

“It’s my take on the local food movement,” said Jeremy Beach, who formerly worked for the USDA. He now teaches and does outreach for the University of Wisconsin Farm & Industry Short Course and Department of Agricultural & Applied Economics.

The taste of Cheese City Beer reflects the land it was grown on and Beach’s experimental attitude.

“It’s not this highly refined, uniform product,” he said.

He dreams of one day opening a tasting room on the farm, but for now, Cheese City Beer is “teetering the line between a very expensive and time-consuming hobby and a small business.”

Beach brewed at home with friends and explored the craft beer market before starting Cheese City Beer.

As he noticed craft beer companies get more experimental with recipes, he had a realization.

“Nowadays, people are throwing Lucky Charms in beer. So I thought, why not make them out of real fruit and berries that I can grow here?” he said.

In addition to hops and barley, he grows high bush cranberries, elderberries, blackberries, aronia berries, hazelnuts, grapes, cantaloupe, muskmelon and watermelon.

It’s a labor-intensive endeavor. The past few years haven’t been good for hops, and even though Beach’s friends and family pitch in to harvest, Cheese City Beer is essentially a one-man operation, with Beach doing all the development, distribution, sales and marketing.

But it’s rewarding.

The beers have had an “awesome response at beer festivals,” Beach said, and now he’s looking forward to telling his own family farm story at Farm Aid.

The hold music on the phone lines at the Farm Aid offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is Wille Nelson singing: “We don’t run, we don’t compromise / We don’t quit, we never do.”

The song could be Cheese City Beer’s anthem, too. Limiting the ingredients for beer to a single farm is challenging, but ultimately, Beach said, he started the company to prove he could do it, without compromise.