The Craft Beer Chronicles: New England
It’s a richly immersive little bit of the USA, is New England. Maybe because it’s closer to old, O.G. England? It has culture, it has “history” (by North American colonial standards) and it has the softest of water which means they make the softest of beers. It also has a very, very long coastline full of edible sea creatures, all together making for quite the jaunt.
Some say New England starts with Connecticut, but I humbly believe it starts with Rhode Island, the littlest state of all and one that is honestly just very posh and nice. One phenomenal brewery to happen upon near the southern end of the state is Tilted Barn, which quite literally is housed in a tilted barn in the middle of a giant field, so 1000 points for accuracy and honesty (and it gets more tilted the more you drink…). What was also noticeable was the fact it doubles as a creche, because 300 screaming toddlers is hard not to notice. There were more under 5s there than there were beers, and the queue to order a pint was shorter than the queue to hang with the donkeys in the petting zoo. The beer is varied and delicious, the noise is cacophonous, it’s probably different on say, a Wednesday rather than a Sunday afternoon but I wasn’t complaining when a staff member brought out a real life giant owl. Nothing like sipping a barn fresh lager while watching some barn fresh wildlife.
Next up was Rhode Island’s underrated capital city, Providence, and its two hypest hype breweries, Long Live and Buttonwoods (cute!). Long Live has garnered a bit of cult fave status as a hazy hub that doesn’t ship outside of the state, and goodness me are the beers flavourful, certainly up there with the best yellow opaque ones we’ve had. The taproom is in an odd little square behind a very uninspiring, rundown street, but is slick and colourful in a way that shows they know they’re a bit of a destination but not too much of a thing. Buttonwoods have been around a little while, but the taproom only opened in May 2024 and it’s basically your living room, if your living room was 10x bigger than it really is and full of people you don’t know (yet!). Cosy and familiar is the name of the game and the beer was a delight, if not quite at Long Live’s level.
Such are the short distances in this part of the world that only half an hour drive’s north is Massachusetts and the spoils of a whole new state, and in particular its most famous hoppy export: Trillium.
Trillium’s brewing home in Canton is an odd beast; presenting more like a huge, glossy business park for a microchip company, the only giveaway that a brewery lies within are the gigantic fermentation cylinders towering over one of the oblong buildings, which certainly would be an odd feature for a microchip company, though probably one welcomed by their hypothetical employees.
The inside is consistent with the outside, featuring a generic corporate Entrance-Greeter-Person™, all a bit robotic and disinterested, and several large, spacious rooms that have a little too much stainless steel gleaming everywhere all up in my face so I had to put my sunglasses on. The beer is excellent, so on this most crucial of elements they have not faltered. As you can no doubt tell from the tone of these paragraphs, I came away fairly non-plussed by the experience, and I usually like to come away from brewery visits plussed at the very least, if not multiplied. I’d recommend stopping in to see Exhibit A of what happens when a brewery simply gets too big, and to sample their hazy pours from the source.
New England then divides northwards into three – Vermont to the west, New Hampshire to the middle and Maine to the east. We didn’t get to Vermont this time, we went to Maine last time (yes click the link) so this was New Hampshire’s turn, where we gorged on seafood and realised that the best beer in New Hampshire was from…Massachusetts, Vermont and Maine. New Hampshire is green and white and posh like old, regular Hampshire, and while breweries abound, none stood out. We therefore largely enjoyed cans and cans of joy picked up from breweries such as Treehouse (Mass), Foam (Vermont) and Battery Steele (Maine).
There are plenty of other breweries all over the place in New England that we haven’t mentioned either here or in the Maine article, including both famous spots (The Alchemist, Lawton’s, Hill Farmstead) and a whole load of lesser known spots, so if you’re passing by on your road trip feel free to take a chance. The delectable thing in New England is that there is a very high floor for beer quality; the worst beer we had was probably a 6 out of 10.
New England is a great little region to explore; it’s really all about the water, whether things caught from within it or made from it. There is a lot to enjoy (unless you are allergic to beer and seafood, in which case maybe do not go there), the people are down to earth, mostly progressive (the Trumpy weirdos do love a brash lawn sign but they’re a minority) and extremely proud of their niche within the US cultural landscape. Or if none of that does it for you, they do relentlessly delicious 8+ percent NEIPAs – from actual NE. The only thing that will get you in trouble is if you pronounce it “Neepa”. Don’t do that or they will deport you back to OG England, and nobody wants that.
