Scratch Brewing Company

Numbers beside the brewhouse

Marika Josephson weighs the brewery through figures as much as wort, working as Beverage Service Professional at Scratch Brewing Company in Ava while overseeing the beer. Her station sits between ownership and brewing, where the ledger, the production plan, and the house method have to agree before anything can move cleanly through the day. Scratch’s work depends on ingredients from its own ground and the surrounding Southern Illinois forest, but Josephson’s role is the structure around that appetite: accounting, logistics, production oversight, and the decisions that keep a small farmhouse brewery steady.

She has described the division plainly: Aaron takes on the foraging and growing, while she handles the business side and oversees the brewing. That is not a separation of craft from administration. At Scratch, the beer begins before the kettle, in cultivated beds and woods, and it still needs measured process once those ingredients come back to the brewhouse. Josephson’s math-minded approach belongs there. It gives the operation a frame in which gathered leaves, roots, fruits, bark, and farm-grown materials can become beer without losing the discipline of a working brewery.

Foraged beer with a farmhouse measure

The program at Scratch is built around foraged and estate-grown ingredients from a 75-acre farm, not as garnish, but as the brewery’s organizing method. The beers are tied to what the surrounding land can provide and what the team cultivates, so the act of brewing follows a wider calendar than malt delivery and cellar turns. Ingredient gathering, growing, brewing, and service sit in one working loop.

That loop also shapes the kitchen. Wood-fired pizza carries the same farm-to-table approach as the beer, with the oven giving the room a second center of heat beside the brewhouse. The wine program stays minimal; the focus is craft beer, foraged beers, and house-made sodas. Nothing in that arrangement asks the counter to behave like a formal dining room. It asks the place to keep faith with its materials, and to serve them without turning the farm into scenery.

The room inside the trees

The room sits in a 1920s farmhouse, with natural light, the wood-fired pizza oven, and the relaxed pressure of a working rural place rather than a staged retreat. Around it are forest and cultivated ingredients, close enough to make the brewery’s method visible without explaining it at every turn. The counter, the oven, the beer, and the farm atmosphere read as one system.

Service is casual, and the noise holds at a conversational level, which matters in a house where the materials carry so much of the story. A glass can arrive with the sense of the surrounding woods still attached to it. A pizza can come from the fire without ceremony. Josephson’s work remains partly behind that ease, in the accounting, the brewing oversight, and the practical keeping of Scratch Brewing Company.