New England Brewing Tales

Several
of these breweries only recently entered the Massachusetts
marketplace and each is striving to get its story out
there.

FOR
THIS Six-pack of
Local Breweries,

I visit one-man
operations, contract breweries, and some small craft
breweries. Each of the breweries profiled here is
distinctive, either for focusing on a specific style of
beer, for their diminutive size, for their limited focus on
producing a single beer.

FRANCONIA
NOTCH BREWING COMPANY
Run single-handedly by brewer and owner John Wolfenberger,
this brewery is a true marvel. In the modern age of craft
brewing, brewers throw around phrases like “brewed by hand”
and “hand crafted” to such an extent as to render them
nearly meaningless. While it remains true that the brewing
systems used by craft brewers pale in comparison to the
industrial monsters in operation in macro-brewing
facilities, the process hardly resembles anything you would
qualify as hand crafted.

Regardless of
your definition of handcrafted, there can be no argument
about the setup at the Franconia Notch Brewing Company.
Inside, the environs are so seriously cramped that many of
the brewing implements, including the auger and the wort
chiller, are suspended from the ceiling. With a brewery he
built himself, there is very little automation. Without the
benefit of electronic arms, Wolfenberger stirs the mash
himself. Without the benefit of assistants or employees,
Wolfenberger is a one-man brewery.

While Franconia
Notch offers only a small portfolio of beers, Wolfenberger
has strict rules he applies to the production of his beers.
His two dueling flagship beers, the Grail Pale Ale and River
Driver Ale, are straightforward interpretations of
English-style ales. All of his beers remain unfiltered and
manage to meet both the strict requirements of the German
Purity Law and the standards to qualify as real ale. With
the influence of his London days continually weighing on his
mind, Wolfenberger also remains steadfastly dedicated to
producing cask-conditioned ales.

Franconia
Notch’s Grail Pale Ale is a curious offering. The beer pours
with a luminous orange color and offers an aroma of tangy
citrus, reserved hops and lightly toasted malts. The flavor
of this classic British-style ale is quite complex and a
little hard to place. It’s a pleasing mix of biscuity malt
flavors and lightly bitter hops that slowly build into more
pronounced bitterness in the beer’s long finish.

TUCKERMAN
BREWING COMPANY
Tuckerman produces only one beer on a regular basis, the
enigmatic Tuckerman Pale Ale. The challenging and curious
flavor profile of this beer draws influence from a variety
of brewing methods – part ale and part lager, the pale ale
confounds as it pleases. In its few, short years of
existence, Tuckerman’s Pale Ale has developed a cult
following for quality and a reputation that comes from its
limited distribution.

In the welcoming
embrace of Conway, NH, and the White Mountains, Nik and
Kirsten Stanciu decided to open their own small business.
They quickly focused on starting their own brewery and
immediately started writing a business plan and homebrewing
test batches. During their experiments, Nik and Kirsten
scored good results brewing a crossbreed product. Borrowing
from many disciplines, the flagship pale ale is a curious
take on the American pale ale style. The style-bending
recipe uses English and Belgian specialty malts and four
varieties of whole leaf hops, including American Cascade,
British Goldings, and two secret varieties, one of which may
be German Hallertau.

In an unusual
twist on the common ale brewing method, the brewers lager
the beer for a week at 32 degrees in horizontal conditioning
tanks and dry-hop it again with whole leaf hops. When the
Tuckerman Pale Ale is ready for packaging, the brewers
inject a small amount of fermenting wort with German lager
yeast into the finished beer to provide a secondary
fermentation that naturally carbonates the beer. The
resulting product is a dull, straw color, and possesses a
slightly tangy aroma mixing citrus and wheat notes. The
flavor remains dry and wheaty, revealing a mild, apricot
fruitiness as it warms.

In contrast to
the approach of the majority of craft brewers, Tuckerman has
focused its efforts on promoting a single product from its
earliest days. While the first plan included the Headwall
Alt as the second offering, the popularity of the Tuckerman
Pale Ale, which accounts for nearly 1OO percent of the
company’s business, precluded any real push for the sibling
brand.

CAPE
ANN BREWING COMPANY
The joint effort of brothers-in-law Michael Beaton and
Jeremy Goldberg, the Cape Ann Brewing Company is one of the
newer production breweries profiled in this article. Located
in the heart of Gloucester, behind Beaton’s real estate
office, the brewery draws upon the town’s rich heritage and
connection with the sea. From the packaging materials, to
the logo and the name of the flagship beer, Cape Ann Brewing
closely associates itself with the local fishing industry
and its courageous tradesmen.

Both Beaton and
Goldberg arrived at the idea of opening a microbrewery by
very different avenues. As a local businessman, Beaton
believed Cape Ann, and specifically Gloucester, deserved its
own beer. When Beaton purchased a building in downtown
Gloucester, he knew that it would be the perfect place for a
small brewery. Though he had the idea in mind, Beaton never
acted upon it.

At the opposite
end of the Atlantic seaboard, Goldberg was developing his
own interest in good beer. Along with four friends, Goldberg
participated in a quirky project that allowed him to visit
38 breweries in 4O days in a minivan. Captured on film, the
beer adventure was chronicled in the documentary American
Beer, produced and directed by Paul Kermizian. Departing
from New York City in June 2OO2, the group traveled over
12,OOO miles drinking their way across America. Along the
way, the cast met with and interviewed many of the pioneers
and leading proponents of the craft beer movement, including
Ken Grossman of the Sierra Nevada Brewing Company, Sam
Calagione of the Dogfish Head Craft Brewing Brewing, and
Fritz Maytag of the Anchor Brewing Company. Goldberg
features prominently in the movie, taking part in some
disturbing, yet hysterical moments and providing great comic
relief.

After he
completed the journey, Goldberg returned to Massachusetts
and started talking about beer. When he admitted that he was
intrigued by the idea of owning his own brewery, Beaton
revealed his own thoughts on the subject. The partners
eventually combined efforts to bring life to their
respective ideas. The resulting product, the Fisherman’s
Brew, is an American Amber Lager brewed literally steps away
from America’s oldest seaport. The initial batches of this
lager released right after the brewery opened were
surprisingly fruity and almost resembled an American wheat
beer. Latter releases have shown more consistency, with a
mild caramel malt flavor mixed with touches of toasted
sweetness.

NASHOBA
VALLEY WINERY With
all of the attractions at the Nashoba Valley Winery estate,
too few people note the little barn off to the side of the
main shop and restaurant. Just beyond the simple exterior,
the structure is home to Nashoba’s own brewery. Amid the
beauty of the estate, the winery and the new distillery, the
brewery has been relegated to suffering the fate of the
oft-neglected middle child. The system is manned by Ben
Roesch, an intense guy with a resolute dedication to craft
beer. A local, Roesch previously worked at the Wachusett
Brewing Company and as the assistant brewer at the Cambridge
Brewing Company before securing the head brewer position
here.

While reserved
on the outside, Roesch is a bit of a rebel on the inside. A
while back, Nashoba was invited to attend a Boston beer
festival focusing on extreme beers. While other breweries
started dry-hopping their regular offerings with ungodly
amounts of hops or throwing their beers into a whiskey
barrel in order to make them extreme, Roesch went medieval
on it all. Literally. Instead of simply tweaking a house
recipe, Roesch decided to recreate an ale as it would have
tasted in the late 13th Century. While modern ales ferment
and condition an average of two weeks before consumption,
Roesch brewed his Medieval Ale a mere five days before the
festival. As historic ales were made solely from grain,
water and yeast, Roesch added no hops to his beer. Without
any natural or artificial preservatives, the beers were
designed for near immediate consumption. The resulting ale
was disturbingly murky, smelled like A-1 Steak Sauce, and
was not particularly palatable. Roesch himself admitted that
the beer was beyond its prime by the time he served it at
the fest. Despite its deficiencies in the taste department,
I give the brewer credit for having the guts and creativity
to create such an unusual beer.

Beyond his
occasional experimentation, Roesch plans to reconnect the
brewery and the estate by using some of its fruits in his
future releases. He hopes to cultivate some wood barrels to
lay down a wheat beer on top of 3O pounds of locally grown
peaches. He plans to inoculate the beer with a commercially
available lambic yeast strain to create a distinctive,
traditional fruit beer.

BUZZARDS
BAY BREWING COMPANY
When the Russell family, owner’s of the Westport Rivers
winery, purchased a nearby 14O acre farm, they were toying
with the idea of opening their own brewery. The Russell’s
originally intended Buzzard’s Bay to function as an ale
brewery. Within two years, a lager product started gaining
headway as the brewery’s flagship product, a position it
maintains to this day. Before too long however, the brewery
was offering eight different beers. Buzzard’s Bay soon
thereafter scaled back its offerings and focused on pushing
the lager product. The decision paid off as the brewery won
a gold medal in the European Style Pilsner category at the
2OOO Great American Beer Festival.

This future of
this brewery tucked away in southern Massachusetts remains
in flux. The brewery recently hired Mark Sampson, formerly
of Harpoon, to take over the operations and shake things up.
In his first few weeks, he commissioned his staff to create
some new beers. The resulting products, which included a
Vienna Lager, and India Pale Lager, and a Pilsner, were a
step in the right direction, especially the spot-on Pilsner.
Sampson, however, left his position within a few weeks and
Bill Russell, Westport’s winemaker, is now pulling
double-duty as head of the brewery. There is also late word
that Buzzards Bay is considering an all-lager format, which
would make it the only such brewery (besides Anheuser-Busch)
in all of New England.

It remains to be
seen where the next few years will take Buzzard’s Bay. With
its over-sized 5O-barrel brewing system, it doesn’t take
long to churn out 5OOO barrels of Buzzard’s Bay beer. In
order to keep the system running, Buzzard’s Bay has taken to
contract brewing for other smaller operations, including
Cisco Brewers and the Coastal Extreme Brewing Company. There
is also talk of brewing some specialty releases, including
classic German lager varieties. Now that’s something I would
raise a pint to.

COASTAL
EXTREME BREWING COMPANY
Operating as Rhode Island’s only craft brewery, Coastal
Extreme is actually an amazing story. Run by four young
friends, Brent Ryan, Mark Sinclair, Derek Luke and Will
Rafferty, who met while attending Colby College, the
partners raised money from family and friends and opened
their brewery. What remains amazing is that not one of them
had a single moment of experience in the beer industry. All
four of the owners graduated with degrees in science, though
Ryan also has a mathematical economics degree. What they
lack in experience, the founders make up for sheer pluck.
They entered the notoriously capital intensive industry at a
time when other breweries were starting to close.

While at first
the whole story sounds like a scenario destined to end
badly, upon closer inspection Coastal Extreme is no
fly-by-night operation. The guys made some smart initial
decisions that saved them a lot of troubles. First, they
carefully researched where to open their brewery. When they
saw that Mainers and Rhode Islanders drank nearly the same
amount of beer, they were intrigued. When they found out
that Maine had almost 2O microbreweries, while Rhode Island
had none, they were sold. Newport was an obvious choice and
one that has served the founders well. While none are native
to the state, they knew that consumers love to partake in
local products, especially those associated with popular
vacation destinations. While the Coastal Extreme name plays
off their personal philosophies of living full lives, the
Newport Storm brand is the one they push in
public.

Once a week, the
team pulls the brewing equivalent of an all-nighter by
producing six batches back-to-back. The monster, 36-hour
brewing process lasts from Tuesday morning until Wednesday
night. Despite the wild name, the brewery’s business
operations are actually quite measured. In their brewery
just outside of Newport, the founders produce mainly draft
beer, along with limited numbers of cans, for their
accounts, while contracting out the space-intensive bottling
operation to a bigger brewery.