There’s a great new “brewery” in town: Pretty Things. They’re based out of Cambridge, and have been around since February 2009. I call them new because their beer really wasn’t readily available in local liquor stores or bars until this past year. And I call them a “brewery” because they don’t actually have one. From their website:
We are a gypsy brewery, without a permanent brewing home. We like it that way, we can be whatever we want to be on a shoestring budget.
Essentially they rent out temporary space in local breweries, such as the Paper City brewery in Holyoke, MA. It’s a pretty interesting model, and I’m curious to see how long it works for them. But regardless, their beer is great, and it’s worth trying. Especially if you like good, innovative craft beers that are brewed locally.
When coming up with their recipes, they don’t generally subscribe to the standard beer styles, and the result is a fairly unique set of offerings. From a recent article in The Atlantic:
“We’re able to be crazy creative,” Martha [the co-owner] said. “We brew for our own entertainment.” Indeed, few breweries are as proudly idiosyncratic as Pretty Things. They draw their own labels and promote their new beers with home videos posted to YouTube. Like other gypsy brewers, they eschew standard styles in favor of deeply personal tastes; Babayaga, which Dann described as a “woodland stout” and is brewed with malts roasted with rosemary, “was meant to taste like an old lady made it in a shack in Eastern Europe.”
Mmm. Eastern European shack.
One thing I’ve been wondering is how a gypsy brewery can maintain consistency from batch to batch if they’re brewing in different places. Most breweries put an immense amount of effort into ensuring each of their offerings tastes the same over time. This involves adjusting the water mineral content and acidity for each batch, and tweaking the recipe to account for the fact that each hops yield can vary in bitterness depending upon when and where the hops were grown. These are all things that could be challenging for a brewery operating “on a shoestring budget.”
So I was excited to find two different batches of their flagship beer, Jack D’Or, in a neighborhood liquor store. A perfect opportunity to test their consistency (and a perfect excuse to drink 44 ounces of beer in the name of “research”). One is labeled “Bottled Aug 2010 Batch 18” and the other “Bottled December 2010 Batch 21”:
Jack D’Or is “an American take on the Belgian saison style.”
The verdict? They did an impressive job. Both batches have the same color tone and malt character. I did notice two very slight differences, but I’m not convinced either are attributable to the gypsy brewing model. First, the December batch seems to be a bit more bitter. But beer bitterness tends to mild as the beer ages, especially when preservatives aren’t used. So I wouldn’t be surprised if it tastes more like the August batch after four more months of aging.
The second difference is the carbonation level. The December batch is a little more carbonated. But like many other craft breweries, Pretty Things beers are naturally carbonated in the bottle. Essentially a small amount of fermentable sugar (usually corn sugar or barley malt extract) is added during the bottling process, and the residual yeast in the beer ferments these sugars in the sealed bottle, adding a negligible amount of alcohol, but more importantly releasing CO2 which carbonates the beer. This process tends to result in more variation than what you get with force-carbonated commercial beers, but it tastes much better. And it’s how beers have been made for centuries.
All in all I’m impressed. Keep it up, Pretty Things.