Trillium, Bourdain, and the Broad Church of Beer

In late August I found myself in Boston, Massachusetts as part of my day job and took the opportunity to explore some of the Boston beer scene, not least in the hope of having some New England IPA (NEIPA) in its own backyard. I won't dwell on the actual beer too much, bar stating the (perhaps) obvious - it was very good across the board.

We could quibble about who is the most famous or notable Boston brewery for some time, but the name I heard most ahead of my trip with was Trillium. Trillium, for the uninitiated, are a famous, successful, and young brewery. Instagram-friendly, their hazy NEIPAs are renowned as some of the best examples of the style. 

A surprisingly reasonably-priced beer at the Trillium Garden on the Greenway

The queues at the Fort Point brewery feature heavily in online discussion of Trillium, and I wasn't let down on the days I visited. While there, I got chatting to a man in front of me in the maybe 100-strong queue. Having dispensed with the requisite Brit abroad chat, he asked me what I was there to buy. 'Beer', I answered. He laughed. 'Yeah, but what beer?' It transpired that I was at the brewery on the afternoon of one of Trillium's multiple 'releases' each week. Today it was a Triple IPA (which I ended up buying a can of) plus some others that I don't recall. When I turned the inquiry back to him, he told me that he had already that morning driven to Tree House Brewing Company (another popular outfit cut from similar cloth) but been put off by the crowds already in line, driven for an hour to the other Trillium brewery site outside of Boston (in Canton, Mass), similarly found it too busy to buy the particular beers he wanted, so had then driven a further half an hour or so into the city to try his luck here. Now that's commitment.

The lengths this man had gone to to secure a few cans of beer put me in mind of Anthony Bourdain's comments a few years back about craft beer drinkers, already discussed by Boak and Bailey among others. The general reaction to Bourdain's criticisms of craft beer and 'Mumford and Sons IPA' was that he was overegging the pudding somewhat and that 'critics of craft beer culture need to make up their minds whether craft beer is a minority diversion enjoyed only by a handful of freaks, or an existential threat'. Amen. My intention here is to contribute some further limited evidence in support of that contention.

Aside from the brewery based at trendy Fort Point, Trillium also run a beer garden (Garden on the Greenway) in a more offices-and-Irish Pubs part of the city that I visited twice. Perhaps the most notable thing about this was that, although there were a handful of the maligned 'people sitting there with five small glasses in front of them, filled with different beers, taking notes', the place was mostly filled with people who clearly had no idea that a) Trillium are a world-renowned brewery or b) that many Craft Beer Nerds would likely consider exchanging a limb for a night spent at the Garden on the Greenway. Most of them were drinking the lowest ABV beer on offer (the superb Launch Beer) and paying it basically no mind whatsoever.

I reflected on this with my drinking partner, also a beer enthusiast, and the analogy we kept stumbling back to was that of beer drinking culture, in pretty much all cases, being a Broad Church. Although Bourdain and others (on both sides) might see a major conflict brewing between Craft Beer Culture and Normal/Proper Drinking, I find it hard to identify where we might actually find the front line of such a conflict. If it isn't visible in the Trillium beer garden, at places like fully-fledged craft venues like Small Bar in Bristol, or indeed in standard boozers now selling Lagunitas IPA, then I am inclined to think it probably doesn't exist.

Do takeovers ruin pubs? A case study

Do takeovers and the accompanying refurbishment ruin pubs? I've had numerous occasions to ponder this question throughout my beer drinking career. My gut response is 'yes, they do'. I have had a number of pubs that were close to my heart fall prey to the cruel whims of an interior decorator clutching a wad of cash from the new owners. Think Changing Rooms but with added alcohol.

This week was the turn of The Griffin Inn, a charming old pub and still-functioning Inn in Bath dating from some time in the 18th Century. (Amusingly, in their history of Bath pubs, Kirsten Elliott and Andrew Swift note that it can 'only' be traced back that far. Tough crowd...) The pub had seemed (to me and some fellow regular visitors) to be doing just fine. It usually had four or more beers on cask (a Timothy Taylor offering, Bristol Beer Factory, and then two others generally from the South West) as well as a further five or six 'craft keg' beers (including Wiper and True, Beavertown Neck Oil, Brugse Zot, Bristol Beer Factory Milk Stout, and Jaipur). Not too shabby as far it goes, and fairly decently priced considering, especially once a generous 10% CAMRA discount was entered into the bargain. Over what I can only imagine were hundreds of pints I drank in the pub, just the one was ever returned and that was at the height of this summer's heatwave and, therefore, somewhat forgiveable. 

                                 The Griffin Inn in happier days. Source.

However, in late September the word went out that the pub would only be open in its current guise for a few more days following its purchase by none other than St. Austell Brewery. Sadly, I didn't make it along for the send-off, notable for the free beer being handed out, but this did not stop me worrying about it all the same. My concerns were three-fold. First, did this mean we were going to see the replacement of the very good cask and keg range from multiple breweries with a more limited (if still good) selection from St. Austell and their other relatively recent acquisition, Bath Ales? Second, was the pub going to become a de facto restaurant? Third, would the interior itself be gutted?

Ahead of the relaunch on Friday October 5th (more on which below), I scoured the website for clues. First impressions were good - the pictures suggested that the refurbishments were non-existent, the bar and other key elements remaining untouched in the photographs. On the cask beer front, there were also some positive noises - Bristol Beer Factory and Timothy Taylor were sticking around and another local offering (Electric Bear) added. Less detail on the keg front, but it didn't look too bad. I was less enthused by the extensive discussion of food - Bath already has more than enough pubs dressing up as restaurants. That said, all things considered this looked like it might be at the better end of the takeover and refurbishment spectrum - some limitations on beer given the new owners, but the basic ethos of the place would remain.

Unfortunately, this was not the case. Myself and a few others arrived at The Griffin on Friday evening around 3 hours after the grand re-opening. The interior was quite wildly different. The bar seemed to have been changed (possibly just the top, though it was hard to tell) and, most notably, the keg dispense moved from the back wall onto the bar itself. This has had the effect of reducing the beer handpumps to a grand total of two (Tribute and Nova from Bristol Beer Factory in this case, plus two ciders). The keg offer, now far more visible, was dispiriting. I can't even remember what there was, but I vaguely recall that Korev featured prominently. Moving on from the beer, things went from bad to worse. The entire back wall of the bar-side of the pub (formerly home to the kegs) was now covered in a cage full of whisky, gin and, somewhat bizarrely, tequila. We subsequently noticed that each table carried a small flyer advertising this inauspicious development, boasting somewhere in the hundreds of bottles of things that were decidedly not beer. The old informal seating had been replaced by something that looked and smelled like a display in Habitat and, sin of sins, there was now dreadful music being piped over the whole affair. The wall opposite the bar, in an even worse development, was now mirrored and had things like a telescope adorning it. What fresh hell, etc.  Perhaps mercifully, the kitchen is not yet complete so there was no major food-driven change to note.

My companions and I were both angry and depressed. What had they done to our pub?! This sentiment, ugly as it might seem with that note of possessiveness in there, was potent given the fact that many of the people in the pub just weren't 'Griffin people' - at least, they previously weren't. Of course, one suspects this is exactly as St Austell would like it to be. The crowd was younger, drinking what seemed to be small vats of gin and tonic (something noticed by Boak and Bailey recently), and didn't seem to care that the music made it hard to enquire as to whether the CAMRA discount was still valid (I'm sure you can guess the answer to that one). 

For what it's worth, the two pints of Tribute that I had were very good and the barman assured me that the local beer (Electric Bear) would be on next. In between getting in my request that Proper Job make an appearance soon, I quizzed the staff about the sale. Their perception of the prior health of the pub was different to mine - 'it was dead in here a lot of the time' - and they liked the refurbishment. I was also told that the accommodation will remain above the pub as well, something that surprised me.

So, do takeovers and refurbishments ruin pubs? The case of The Griffin hasn't made me rethink my initial response, but it has made me think a bit more carefully about the question. First, these things are obviously all subjective to an extent - I'm sure some people hated how the pub was before. That tedious observation aside, I am maybe more concerned that this is simply the way these things are always going to go from now on. And it is in this context that micropubs and, different but in some way the same, dedicated craft bars are perhaps going to become panaceas for those who previously just wanted a pub, not a Spirits Emporium or Curiositie Shoppe or whatever.