New England Breweries in Planning?

Any update on the Broad Brook drama in Suffield or Cold Creek’s hiatus in Ellington?

 

The Galaxy dry hopped invisible airwaves is the best beer I've had from Stellwagen so far. They had several beers available last night and settling in nicely

 

So, no like ... Farmhouse brewery that does world-class mixed fermentation beers or blending? No brewery focusing on crafting German or Belgian styles or anything interesting?

All just NEIPAs? Pass.

 

Money talks

 

Yeah, demand aside, even as someone who definitely likes NEIPAs, I’m a little bored with yet another NEIPA brewery opening up. I won’t go out of my way to try it. But if a new brewery opened focusing narrowly on something nobody else does – i.e. only gruits or only onsite English style cask ale – I’d make a point to visit right away.

 

It doesn't even need to be a narrow focus. A lot of the criticism around the dominance of IPA is that it crowds out other styles. That may be true in certain instances, but there's a lot of breweries around who are using IPA to subsidize their more esoteric brews. Idle Hands, Medusa, etc. Especially if you're tying to evangelize overlooked styles, it's probably easier to get someone to try an ESB once you've established your brand credibility with your killer IPA.

I like IPAs, I drink IPAs, I'm not against any brewery making an IPA. But breweries that only make IPA... what are you really adding to the scene? Not every beer every brewery does will be, or can be, unique. But something should be, or else, what good are you?

 

I'll buy the idea that you'll get more people in the door by making a killer IPA business model. However, that brewery then decides, "Hey, we make way more money on our hop-forward stuff, let's just abandon every other style we make." Then we have another NEIPA producer.

All I'm saying is that when I hear, "There's a new brewery coming to Foliagetown, Massachusetts and they're planning to specialize in hazy IPA, I immediately tune out. I don't care anymore.

 

Money talks - spend your money on non-IPA styles and brewers will make more of them. Most brewers are passionate about alot of other styles that are not-IPA but there isn't a demand for them so they rarely make them. But when you have bills to pay you have to brew what sells and hopefully that subsidizes styles you love.

Just from a data perspective in MA liquor stores Year-to-date - IPA (and its variations like DIPA) is 39% of the market, Pale Ale is 7%, and seasonal is 15% which is largely made up of hoppy beers too. Nearly 6 out of every 10 craft beers sold is hop forward.

Saisons are 0.45% of the market. Not likely to see many new Farmhouse centric brewers anytime soon, unfortunately.

 

Granite Coast Brewing should be opening soon, late Fall I think. Talking with the owner they’re definitely not going to be an all (D)IPA brewery. Quite the opposite, actually.

https://www.granitecoastbrewing.com/

 

Trust me, Allagash & Oxbow get plenty of my money. I totally get the business side of it. The point of my original post was that if I lived in a state in which every new restaurant specialized in pizza, I'd eventually yearn for something else. And I love pizza. Don't get me wrong. I get that everyone loves pizza and stocks up on pizza for birthdays and pizza sharing parties. It's great to wait in line for pizza sometime. Maybe even some ingenious marketing scheme will get me to buy four slightly bigger pizzas instead of six regular sized pizzas and charge the same price. But then you get over pizza. It's fine. You want a burger or a steak & cheese or a burrito. And so you're like, "Dude, why can't a burrito place open up?" when another pizza joint opens up down the road and you get responses like, "Because pizza sells more than burritos." So, sure, I get it. It just doesn't make me feel great about the new pizza place.

 

11 mentions of "pizza" on a beer related post is a record! Don't get me wrong, there is definitely some overlap.

 

Anyone read the story about Walden Woods. The taproom was complete to the point that there are bags of barley on the shelves and boxes of WW glassware waiting to be opened. Then the owners announced they would not be opening.

Flying Dreams is going to take over the space

 

Sounds like Flying Dreams was at the right place at the right time. Able to walk into a fully built out brewery probably at a fraction of the actual cost to build it out themselves.

To bad for the WW people, anyone know what happened?

 

Flying Dreams also walked right into Wormtowns old space, so it’s not the first time they’ve been in the right place.

 

I’ve yet to try Flyig Dreams nor have I heard anything incredible but I guess business is good?

 

hell there is barley on the shelves.

No idea what happened and they didn't elaborate when they announced that WW would not open.

It is kind of odd that the landlord seems to have taken possession of all the contents of the building though.

 

I've had Pond Jumper on tap recently and thought it was very good. I tried a few of his other IPAs and IIPAs when he first got going and thought they were just ok. They were more malt forward than I prefer. Well made but not my preference.

I used to drink a lot of his beer at the Gardner Ale House back in the day. Does a lot of different styles very well. The problem I have now is the bomber format. Also, his logo and art work are a mess. Very hard to read and distinguish. No bearing on anything really but a head scratcher for me.

I wish him well. I work in Southborough and would love another place nearby to hit after work.

 

I'm the sales director over at Flying Dreams and I'm happy to hear that you enjoyed Pond Jumper! I'd recommend giving our newer IPAs a shot, ConSession Session IPA and Double Mando Double IPA, they're definitely on the juicier side of things, but have a nice balance of bitterness on them too.

On to the meat of the discussion... The bombers are on their way out. We put the deposit down on the canning line recently and we're hoping to be up and running in cans late fall / early winter. As for the art we're working on that too, we're simplifying the font we use for the main logo and we're going to do a revamping of the artwork itself for the cans, we have some initial designs right now and they're looking great!

We're super excited about Marlborough, we can't wait to have a location where we can do full pours of our beers and have space for people to hang out for a while. It's going to be an exciting (and busy!) few months for us with a lot of big changes, but we're ready to make the jump.

In the meantime, if you stop into the Worcester tasting room or see me at a festival over the next couple of months (that's my mug right next to this post) say hi! I'm more than happy to talk anyone's ear off about our beers. We have a great selection of beers right now and lots of awesome stuff in the pipeline that we're excited to put out there.

 

From the Barrell (Derry, NH) opened their new taproom today. Haze beers galore (+1 Porter) & the new darling, a Brut IPA.

Place is small & was packed, beer is very good. May need to find a bigger place soon.

 

As an example Lamplighter originally planned to focus on sours and Bretts and not make an IPA. They had one available for growler fills the week before they opened and by opening night (I attended) the IPA had kicked and was not available.

To their credit they adjusted their plans a bit, still make good sours and Bretts but have a few IPAs on tap at all times as well.