tastewar.com

Category: Beer

  • The Summer of Beer

    The Summer of Beer

    I will readily confess to enjoying beer, though I have always considered myself more of an aficionado than a connoisseur. I appreciate that the world of (readily available to me) beer has expanded from what was available when I was coming of age (see my previous post) to what we have today, and specifically the proliferation of local breweries. I do sometimes wonder if we have reached “peak craft beer” but there isn’t a brewery on every street corner yet, so perhaps not. (It was amusing to me that when we visited Clara in Austin, in the less-than-a-mile walk from our hotel to her apartment, we passed by two breweries, but that’s Austin!)

    This summer, with the help of friends, I cooked up a scheme to get a group of folks to visit more local breweries, and I put together a “Brewery Passport” with a page for each local brewery, and some extra pages for more remote breweries that people might visit in their travels. I even wrote software to generate the pages from a spreadsheet containing relevant data about each brewery, and a photo and name of each participant. A good friend took the resulting booklets and hand-bound them into covers made from six-pack holders. The artifact itself is one of my favorite creations of all time.

    On the 29th of June, we had a kickoff event at a local beer hall (which some have mistaken for a brewery…) where we distributed the 20 passports to participants, and agreed to meet again on the 15th of September to celebrate our dubious accomplishments. The listed breweries were all within 10 miles, most within about 5, so they were almost all very bikeable. The idea was that people would plan a trip to a brewery and announce it via a WhatsApp group we created for the purpose, so that others could join in. That didn’t seem to catch on in the group, however. But people did like the idea of visiting local breweries, and some even thought of it as a climate-friendly way of enjoying local tourism.

    By the end, I managed to visit all 24 of the original listed breweries (3 of them on the second to last day!), walking or biking to 17 of them. In addition to that, I visited 30 other breweries this summer. Many of those were still within Massachusetts, but not bikeable (not by me, anyway) and were part of the Mass Brewers’ Guild passport program. Amusingly, I thought that my Brewery Passport was a completely novel idea, but I have come to learn that there are, and have been, many such programs (I do think that my passports are the best of all those that I’ve seen, though). Some of those extra 30 were visited during our travels this summer, in Rhode Island and Texas.

    I thoroughly enjoyed the activity, and when I asked bartenders if they had a brewery stamp, and showed them the passport, that would often be the start of a very interesting conversation, which wouldn’t have taken place otherwise. And that’s what I did on my summer vacation.

  • The King is Dead (Almost…)

    The King is Dead (Almost…)

    I can’t believe I’m having to write this. Cambridge Brewing Company opened in a run-down, post-industrial, pre-biotech part of Cambridge on the outskirts of Kendall Square in 1989. That was the year after I graduated college. I didn’t know about it initially, as I had moved out of the area (way out to Waltham), and worked in Boston. But in 1991, I started working just outside Kendall Square, and I discovered CBC. Spending money was short in those days, so I won’t say I went often, but I did stop by periodically. It was a revelation. I knew that Budweiser and Miller could not be all there was to beer, but there were not a lot of interesting options. Heineken? Molson? St. Pauli Girl? I mean, there were other brands, but a bar that served something other than the big 2, and maybe Guinness for an Irish bar, was unusual, if not downright pretentious.

    Into that milieu came CBC, along with three other local brewing startups from that era – Harpoon (Mass. Bay Brewing Co.), Sam Adams (Boston Beer Co.), and Commonwealth Brewing Co. So in the Boston area, you would start to see some “local” beers (Sam Adams was contract brewed elsewhere for a while), certainly in stores, and occasionally at a bar. Commonwealth Brewing was a brewery and restaurant that was located near the Boston Garden. While both CBCs were labeled “brewpubs” Commonwealth always felt more like a restaurant, and not someplace you might go to hang out at the bar. So I always had a preference for the more laid back atmosphere of Cambridge.

    I would never have been counted among the regulars there, but until perhaps ten years ago, if you wanted to bring someone to a restaurant (or bar) where they brew their own beer, there were few other choices. Cambridge Brewing kept things lively by brewing a wide variety of beers, including a Heather Ale, and the occasional gruit. They also experimented with wild “Brett” yeast. If you wanted to expand your beer horizons, there was no better place.

    There was one year, though, when I was something of a regular. From June 2016 through June 2017 CBC had what they called the “Beer Year” contest, where you were invited to post to Instagram every different beer you had there, and if after a year, you had posted

    about every unique beer that they had brewed over those 12 months, you would earn a special mug. I would say that I went above and beyond over the course of that year, by also posting their traditional (of that era) four drafts, the 3 different canned beers they offered, posting when I had one of their beers at a different local restaurant/bar, and posting the many unique beers they made for their pumpkin fest which were not required for the contest. All in all, I made 74 posts to Instagram for the beer year, and in fact, the Beer Year was the reason I signed up for Instagram in the first place. I was working in Waltham at the time, and would ride my bike to work once a week, then ride home “the long way” (and it was a lot longer) via CBC. It was a glorious year, and I still treasure my special mug.

    After that, my visits went back to their more ordinary pace of “occasional” but when it was time for another “Guys Night Out” I could almost always be counted on to suggest CBC (to the chagrin of at least one friend), and if that ended up being the chosen venue, I would always arrive early to get in an extra round (or two, or…), to see what was new on tap. One of the first places I visited after the worst pandemic restrictions were being lifted was CBC.

    Cambridge Brewing has also long been a great supporter of the local craft brewing scene. For their recent 35th anniversary celebration, there were a bunch of beers available from former brewers who have gone on to work at other breweries. From the menu, there were brews from “Ben Howe of Otherlands Beer, Megan Parisi of Samuel Adams, Jay Sullivan & Sean Nolan of Honest Weight, Kevin Dwyer from Oxbow, Lee Lord of Naragansett, Ben Roesch of Murder Hill, and Anthony Lauring of Outrider Brewing.” Pretty amazing, no?

    So I was totally caught off guard this past weekend when CBC announced that they would be closing at the end of the year. It would be hard to overstate how much I will miss Cambridge Brewing Company. I know they won’t particularly miss me – I was never someone who was going to keep the place afloat – but CBC has been a constant presence for almost all of my adult life, and I foolishly thought it would always be there. To Phil (the owner) and Will (the brewmaster), I wish happy retirements and/or next ventures. You provided me with 35 years of amazing beer, a creative food menu, and a great place to hang with friends. Próst!