Thursday, October 18, 2018

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.

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