The first few days of my trip to Boston/Worcester is turning into a very fruitful beer adventure!
Drinking tips in Massachusetts:
Grocery stores cannot sell alcohol of any kind; there's pretty tight control at liquor stores and we were told at one place that only Massachusetts driver's licenses were accepted as a form of ID... (For real)
As craft beer has exploded here, many of the wine stores now sell craft beer too and don't seem to have as strict of ID requirements as liquor stores.
The places:
Worcester, Massachusetts: (1 Hour Straight West of Boston) [b:3pqlv5p1]"The Armsby Abbey"[/b:3pqlv5p1]: An Abbey, it's not; an utterly fantastic brew pub, most definitely. It's in downtown Worcester, Massachusetts, fairly small but the food selection and the beer selection are utterly fantastic. They have 22 beers on tap including 6 permanently devoted to Belgian beers. The bottled list is huge including 10 Lambics and Guezes.
They're having a beer dinner with Rob Todd the brewer from Algash the week after I leave, but I've seen Rob's beer talk before from the YouTube video from when he visited Google. <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="
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"The Dive Bar"- Worcester, Massachusetts; owned by the same guy that owns Armsby Abbey (above) but the drinks are considerably cheaper. Right now they're dedicating all of their taps to Massachusetts craft breweries only (at least 10 Massachusetts breweries showcased); so I hope to make it there later this week.
The Boston Brewing Company; "Sam Adams" Brewery in Boston: Mediocre tour at best, they rush you through the pilot brewery (which is all that is in Boston) to get you into the sampling room so that the propaganda can be fed to you. They skipped right over the Utopious barrels and wouldn't let us in the Barrel aging room (which I understand). Cool tour, still worth seeing, especially as it's free and you get three beers and a shot glass. There's a suggested donation of $2, which goes to charity. They do brew the experimental and small batch beers here including hand bottling the "Barrel Room Collection" on site.
"The Green Dragon" pub; Boston; the original Green Dragon pub (long lost) is supposed to be the site that the planners of the American Revolution regularly drank.
"The Bell in Hand Tavern" -the Oldest Continualy Operating Tavern in America
The Beer:
Hitachino Nest Espresso Stout- From Japan's best craft brewery; I've been looking to try one of their beers for quite a while and this did not dissapoint. This is now tied in my list with Peche Mortel as my favorite beer brewed with coffee. It's got a bit of sweetness to help balance the coffee; it's very light on the espresso and is only slightly different than a Roast Barley flavor.
Birrifico Baladin's "Nora"- Finally!! After actually driving to visit the Baladin brewery and coming up with nothing, I find "Nora" in a random wine store and it's gorgeous. Wheaty and spiced wonderfully a pretty light body; very refreshing.
Cisco "Cherry Woods": The brewery is from Nantucket, Massachusetts (insanely expensive and posh), the brewery has a barrel aged series and this is a wheat beer brewed with sweet cherries (they ordered sour cherries for a Kreik but got these instead by accident), it's been soured using "wild bacteria and yeast" that they don't specify. The same people own a vineyard and distillery in Nantucket.
The beer was a light pink color and cloudy with a small lacy head. It smelled of vinegar and I got a bit worried at this point. The taste is lightly tart, crisp and refreshing with no brett notes. -It's VERY refreshing and the perfect drink for the hotest and most humid of weather.
Element Brewing Company: "Dark Matter"$$ after a threatened law suit from Brooklyn is renaming the beer to "Dark Element" but this is one of the few bottles that says "Dark Matter" still. It's an "American Black Ale"/Black IPA style beer that the brewer claims is "schwartz beer meets American IPA." Element's beers come in 750ml champagne bottles wrapped in bags.
It has a Clotworthy Dobbin color and malt profile, is even sweeter, a flavor of figs, and the candy flavors from what would seem to be a belgian ale yeast.
Mikeller Texas Ranager- Barrel Aged Chipotle Porter- I can't find much information on it, but it's made with Chipotle peppers and certainly smells like it has smoked malt but not beech smoked malt; I've had a cherry wood smoked malt before and this is similar so I'd say that they actually smoked it with chipotle wood if I had to guess.
It's INSANELY dark and black letting NO light through, thin head, and pure smoke on the nose. There's chocolate in the flavor, too. I love peppers in a stout and this is a great mix of sweet, "stouty", smokey, and spicy. Beautiful.
Managed to pick up the new Sam Adam's Barrel Room collection which includes, "American Kreik", "New World Tripel", & "Stony Brook Red". They're the Boston Brewing Company's first beers brewed with bacteria and "wild" yeasts. They're not naturally fermented but innoculated with unlisted mixes of bacteria and yeast in a separate match that they're calling "Cosmic Mother Funk". This "CMK" stuff is then blended in different amounts with the above three beers.
The American Kreik is made with Balaton sour cherries; they're originally from Hungary but a Dr. from the University of Michigan traveled to Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Poland looking for new varieties of tart cherries, brought many varieties back to the US for testing. The result of the program was the selection of and cultivation the Balaton sour cherry. (I tried to buy some from Michigan as they were just ripe a couple of weeks ago, but the whole crop is already sold out; it seems the pie makers have immediately taken a liking to Balaton cherries.)
It's exciting because the largest American Craft Brewer (and the largest American-owned brewery, PERIOD) is now experimenting with other brewing organisms in the Belgian tradition and these beers are going to get into the hands of a WHOLE lot more people now. (The beers are selling for roughly $11 a piece in beautiful hand corked bottles, so an accessible price, too.)
Adam
