The Great American Ale Trail - Christian DeBenedetti [136]
“If you have to leave the brewery and find another place to drink, you don’t have to go very far. We’re in a blue-collar neighborhood, Jamaica Plain. It’s the home neighborhood of James Michael Curley, the famous rascal mayor of Boston. He actually lived near our brewery and wanted his own parish, so now, around our brewery is a parochial school and Our Lady of Lourdes, a church—Mayor Curley’s parish.
“Just down the street is a bar called Doyle’s. Doyle’s has been a bar since the 1880s, so you’re drinking at a place that’s been a bar for almost 130 years. It’s owned by a family of Irish guys—wonderful people—the Burkes. They grew up running bars, and their dad had the beer concession at the zoo. All they ever wanted to do was run a great bar, and they’ve done that. It’s this complete, wonderful melting pot, what a bar should be. That’s where Ted Kennedy used to spend St. Patricks’s Day. Mayor Flynn [Boston mayor from 1984 to 1993] went to Doyle’s. I was there once when Mayor Flynn was tending bar on Saturday night. If there were a real Cheers bar, it would be Doyle’s.”
Jamaica Plain
BOSTON BEER COMPANY
30 Germania St. • Jamaica Plain, MA 02130 (617) 983-9036 • bostonbeer.com • Established: 1984
SCENE & STORY
A tour of Boston Beer Company paints the picture of what is perhaps America’s most remarkable craft brewing story. Starting in 1984, Jim Koch has built what is now the nation’s largest craft brewing company. The Boston facility operates as a test brewery and barrel aging facility; the firm’s commercial beers are brewed elsewhere. Through a remarkable combination of a great story and a standout recipe (the recipe for Boston Lager was based on a recipe created by his great-grandfather, Louis Koch), quality control, timing (the microbrewing wave was simmering nationwide), ready investment capital, hard work (he pounded the pavement and learned to drive a forklift himself ), Koch and company created a barnburner of a brand and haven’t looked back.
Today, more than eight hundred local bars serve the company’s beers (and thousands nationally). The company’s lineup has expanded to dozens of styles, including one bi-annual release that ranks among the world’s strongest, Utopias, a costly elixir aged for years in oak barrels and costing hundreds of dollars per bottle. Visitors wend through display cases brimming with medals, accounting sheets from the early days, and prototype bottles before settling in with some tasters at a small bar area. It’s hard to believe how much has changed in America’s brewing scene in just twenty-seven years. A Cincinnati native, Koch is proud of the role he’s played in the advent of craft-brewed beer in Boston and around the country. In 1989, Boston Beer Company was cranking out some 60,000 barrels of beer. In 2011, that number stands at more like 2.25 million annually.
“In a lot of ways, American craft brewers have become sort of the Noah’s Ark of the world’s brewing traditions,” Koch says. “We are preserving and developing them here at the same time as they are dying out in their home countries,” he says. “I’d like to think that we’re one of the few pioneers of the industry left that still has that passion for innovating, experimenting, and pushing the envelope.”
PHILOSOPHY
No stone unturned. There are plenty of Sam Adams beers that aren’t all that good, but for all the experiments and misfires, there’s an overall ratio of excellence. A couple of years ago, Koch had a five-hundred-pound bale of fresh hops delivered, literally picked off the vine earlier in the day, which is a remarkable feat (the flower-like cones, which are best when fresh, give beer its bitterness,