When I attended the Mass Brew Bros. blind tasting of local stouts there was animated conversation amongst the tasters covering all aspects of the local beer scene. One brewery that many talked about in glowing terms was Springdale Brewing, the offshoot of Jack’s Abby that focuses on ales, sours and barrel aged beers. A few of the […]
Category: Beer Review
Otter Creek Russian Imperial Stout
Otter Creek made a big announcement recently, after 8.5 years their head brewer Mike Gerhart is leaving the brewery. Rumor has it that he is taking a job with Hill Farmstead, which is widely considered one of the best breweries in the world. Gerhart has played an instrumental role as Otter Creek overhauled their brand […]
Castle Island Vern
One of the hardest things about starting a new brewery is consistency. Once a brewer gets to the point that they brewing beer professionally they usually have some good recipes, but consistently executing these ideas on large scale can take some time. Some brewers learn from their mistakes as they go, but a select few hit the ground running […]
Lawson’s Finest Liquids Sip of Sunshine
I try to focus my blogging (and thus the vast majority of my drinking) on New England beers, so my knowledge of breweries in the rest of the country is more limited. Occasionally I see other beer geeks get excited when an out of state brewery announces that they are going to begin local distribution and […]
Lost Nation Mosaic IPA
The Saturday before last we had a couple friends over and after the little man went to bed we all drank a few beers and played some board games. I purchased a selection of beers for the occasion, leaning a little towards hop-heavy selections due to the tastes of the group. My friends brought a […]
Sam Adams 26.2
There are few things more authentically Boston than the Patriots Day/Marathon Monday holiday. The holiday is really only celebrated in Boston, most of the city has the day off, the Red Sox have the only 11 AM game of the year and a bunch of overly motivated and/or crazy people run for 26.2 miles while […]
Amherst Two Sisters and Jess
My wife has to travel locally as part of her job, and we’ve started to do a little research to see if there are any brewery stops that are out of the way normally but on her travel route. This is the place where you can rave about how awesome my wife is, you know it’s love […]
Barrel House Z RR#23
I’ve mentioned before on the blog that as more breweries open and move into the state it becomes increasingly important for a new brewery to stand out from the pack in some way. A great way to do this is to focus on a specific subset of style of beers to start, like Mystic does with saisons or […]
Aeronaut Robot Crush
I am a sucker for any kind of beer awards, if I see a listing of best beers I’ll definitely browse through and search for local recipients. I know that there can be issues with these types of awards. The crowd-sourced best beer awards tend to favor whalez, there is a selection bias where the reviewers give higher ratings to […]
Kelsen Draken Robust Porter
In the increasingly crowded shelves of a local bottle shop the way you market your beer, including the beer names and artwork, can make a huge difference in sales. Some breweries unfortunately still use sexist art and names, I for one refuse to drink any beer by a brewery that has offensive beer names/labels. I […]
Hoppy Boston 