The Great American Ale Trail - Christian DeBenedetti [135]
Open since July 2009, the sister pub to Ebenezer’s has a similarly incredible draft selection in an easier-to-reach location. Owners Chris and Jen Lively have stocked it with a copper-topped bar, hand-blown glass tap handles, dark wood and brewery signage throughout, “Beer 101” tasting classes on Wednesday nights, and a pilot brewing system for special guest brewers to take for victory laps (with the results available in the bar later).
THE GREAT LOST BEAR
540 Forest Ave. • Portland, ME 04101 • (207) 772-0300 • greatlostbear.com
A dimly-lit British-style pub packed with ephemera and breweriana, the Great Lost Bear opened in 1979 and arguably helped Maine’s nascent brewing industry take shape throughout the 1980s. With some 70 taps, 50 of which are from the Northeast (including 15 from Maine), it’s still a favorite destination for beer lovers in the area and tourists, and its “Allagash Alley”—a tap row proudly dedicated to the local brewer’s beers—is a nice touch.
Massachusetts
GOING BACK TO THE DAYS OF THE MAYFLOWER AND THE FOUNDING Fathers, beer has long played a central role here. Today the earliest breweries are long gone but thanks in part to Jim Koch, the energetic founder of Boston Beer Company, the homegrown tradition is alive and well. “Boston was one of the original brewing centers in the United States,” explains Koch on a recent afternoon visit to his South Boston headquarters, a renovated, 25,000-square-foot brewery that gets about 150,000 thirsty visitors per year. “The first brewery in the English colonies was built here in Boston, in 1635, the year before Harvard was founded,” he says. “I guess you can’t have college if you don’t have beer.”
Koch, a sixth-generation brewmaster who holds BA, MBA, and JD degrees from Harvard, describes why beer has always been so important to Boston life. “From the day the Pilgrims landed, beer was a part of the social fabric here,” he says. “For one, it was a nutritional necessity; water was polluted. By the 1600s, one of the duties of the president of Harvard was for his wife to brew beer—for the students. Today there’s a street in Cambridge called Alewife. There was even one president who got kicked out—because his wife made bad beer,” Koch says.
Flash-forward a hundred years, at which point Boston was welcoming waves of European immigrants, including scores of brewers. “At the turn of the twentieth century, there were thirty-one breweries inside the city limits, mostly in this area,” says Koch. Inspired by Samuel Adams’s story, Koch decided on the Boston area to carry on the family tradition. An article in an old magazine tipped him to a vacant brew house in which to sink capital he’d raised working as a high-powered consultant, but the neighborhood gave him second thoughts.
“It was an eyesore,” recalls Koch. “There were trees growing all over; there was a squatter; there were gangs. We couldn’t get people to work here. It was a real problem.”
Working with a neighborhood association, Koch and his band of brewers became an anchor tenant and were soon delivering fresh beer to the managers of old Boston pubs. “The whole idea was insane. No one had heard of microbrews,” Koch remembers. “Back then, the whole beer world was mass-produced domestic beers: Bud, Miller, Coors, and imports. There was nothing else.”
Today there are more than fifty-four breweries and brewpubs in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, along with some of the finest beer bars in the country.
DETOUR
THE BOSTON BOY:
Jim Koch on Drinking Beer
in Boston and Doyle’s Café
“Boston’s a great beer town because it’s a community that combines so many different elements. It’s a basic, blue-collar town, with the neighborhoods like Southie and Charlestown that you see in the movies—those are real places. You’ve got Good Will Hunting going on there. And Boston’s also the world’s center of higher education. Boston is able to put them together in this extraordinary way.
“That’s the essence of beer. Beer is democratic; beer is the alcoholic beverage equivalent