Bella Rees, a Southington High School graduate, is the 2026 winner of the Orchard Valley Garden Club scholarship.
Bella will be attending Johnson & Wales in Rhode Island and majoring in Sustainable Food Systems with a minor in Policy & Advocacy. While finding comfort in baking in her kitchen, Bella is also passionate about the environment.
She spoke to the club at its July 28th membership meeting.
This picture was taken by local wildlife photographer Ashley Cumberledge, who writes: "My husband and I saw this gorgeous barred owl a few months ago at Panthorn Park. If you’ve ever seen an owl in the wild, you know it’s such a special moment!"
For more photography by Cumberledge, see her Instagram account here.
Updated: 1 day ago
Dan Baril is best known to most people in town as Mister B, the owner of Mister B’s Jerky Co. His shop downtown at 35 North Main Street has two kinds of customers: those who are already addicted to his all-natural varieties of savory beef jerky, and those who are about to be.
He has been running his shop for ten years now.
“Ten years ago I was looking around for a shop in Meriden, where I was born and raised,” he said. “I happened to be driving down a strip mall in Plantsville, and bumped into this lady who asked if I wanted to take over her lease at a place downtown. Back then rent was $1,000 a month. So I bought all the equipment I needed, and I said to myself, if it doesn’t work out, I’ll have the best garage-made beef jerky in town.”
For a few years, Baril worked two jobs at once, crafting machine tools and running his beef jerky operation whenever he could spare the time.
“Then the store took off and I was like, ‘Crap, now what do I do?’ I bought another dehydrator and doubled the amount of jerky that we make.”
Finally, in August 2019, he decided to devote all his energy to jerky making.
Baril gets up before the crack of dawn to start work. “I’ll come down about five in the morning, fill up the dehydrators. Let them run all day about 12 hours. I’m a morning person so I’m up every day early anyway. They’re done by five. I clean up and can relax for a few hours. During the rest of the day I’m prepping the meat for the next day.”
The cuts are top rounds from cattle raised in Nebraska. “I trim off the small layer of fat on the outsider of the roast,” Baril explained. “Then I slice them. I throw them in the freezer first to semi-freeze them so they’re easier to slice.”
“I dry them as steaks in the dehydrator and then I cut them, it’s more time efficient. Then I cool and vacuum seal them to take all the air out.”
The quantities of meat he processes are eye-opening. “We went from three roasts a night to eight when we doubled our dehydrators. You lose 55 percent of the weight when you dry them, so if I start with 100 pounds of meat, you’re getting 40. We’ve done over 10,000 pounds of meat this year, and sold over 4,000.”
There aren’t many places that specialize in making beef jerky – according to Baril, there is only one other manufacturer in the state of Connecticut. To be successful at it, one has to have good ingredients, a good recipe, and hustle.
“When I come back from vacation next week,” he said, “I’m going to be seven-days-a-week with the Terryville Pickle Festival. At the pickle fest I sold 964 bags last year of two flavors, the dill garlic and the dill hickory. I soak them in real dill pickle juice. But it’s a gamble. If I make too much, I’m sitting on 300 bags.”
Despite the work involved, doing shows is one of things Baril enjoys most. “My favorite part is doing the shows and meeting people,” he said. “I’ll give out samples and they’ll say ‘Oh my god, that’s really good.’ I’ve yet to hear anyone say it really stinks. They may say they can get it cheaper somewhere else, but they never say anything about the quality.”
Baril will jerk other kinds of meat, even if his own preference remains beef. “I’m a beef, bacon, and beer guy,” he said. “But if you shoot it, I’ll jerk it. Remember my job title – I’m the Master Jerk. I don’t promote it, but in February, after the shows slow down, I’ll do it. Bear, moose, deer, elk. I did alligator once. Didn’t care for it, too fishy. There’s a bison farm out in Brooklyn, Connecticut, and I’ll do some for them.”
Baril says that pork doesn’t jerk well. “You can do pork, but the problem is that it makes a mess. The fat drips out of the dehydrator and the cool air makes it into stalagmite things like in a cave. I did a bit once and it was the biggest freakin’ nightmare.”
The kitchen area is spotless, as required by health department code – a code Baril himself helped write.
“I’m a Class 4 facility here, higher than Anthony Jacks or McDonalds, because of a four-letter word: CURE. It’s cured meat. You’ve got to hit 165 degrees the first hour to kill the bacteria. Then after that I turn the heat down.”
“I wrote the regulations that are in Hartford for doing beef jerky. Nobody had ever done it before. I had a friend of mine who audits meat facilities and she wrote the whole variance from start to finish. We had to teach the guys in Hartford the thing. If I see the health inspectors at the markets I say, ‘I wrote the variance.’ They say, ‘So you know what you’re doing?’ I say, yeah, kinda.”
Asked what kind of jerky he eats at home, Baril had a surprise answer: “I’ve got none at home. It drives everybody crazy who comes over the house. They open the fridge and go ‘what?’ I say, I got 500 pounds at the store. The last thing I want to do is being thinking about it.”
As much as Baril likes to kid around, he takes just as much satisfaction from helping people out and connecting with them.
“I try to be friendly with people. This one guy would come in all the time and bring me Italian bread from Waterbury. My wife knows him too. It turns out he just got stage-four throat cancer. So when my wife found out the other day what he likes for jerky, I brought him the jerky. We’ll give it to him because he needs the protein.”
“I have a saying: you don’t know what other people are going through, so just say hi and be nice. When people come in here, you don’t know if you’re the only person they going to talk to all day. Sometime I’ll talk for an hour or two hours – if someone comes in and starts talking about fishing, forget it. That’s just the person I am.”
For Baril, the support he has received from his friends has been essential, not to mention the support he has received from his family.
"I absolutely gotta thank my wife, Christine," he said. "My daughter Danielle helped with the t-shirts, the ones that say 'Get Your Jerk On.' My youngest daughter Melissa helped out a lot with the store in the beginning, especially doing the labels. And my son, he was the taste tester - come in, taste something, and go run errands."
Mr. B’s Beef Jerky will be holding its tenth-year anniversary party at the store this Saturday, August 8, from 9am to 4pm.
