Trillium Brewing turns one
How a farmhouse brewery in Boston comes to be
For a new brewery, time is often the greatest asset and there’s never enough to go around.
So for a one-year-old brewery, even stopping to reflect on how far they’ve come on their anniversary might seem like a luxury. Because, after all, where does one find that time? While stopping at Home Depot when they open at 6 a.m. to pick up parts before heading into the full-time day job? After putting the kids down for an afternoon nap and spending hours on invoicing and inventory? Or on Saturday afternoons sprinting to fill growlers while pouring samples and fielding questions about the brewery from a line of customers that stretches out the door?
Rather, for JC and Esther Tetreault, the owners of Boston’s Trillium Brewing Co., the days pass by in a blur of what needs to get done, while keeping an eye on what the future demands.
“We’ve just been trying to get through every single day and every morning and every afternoon and every night and we just collapse into our beds, hoping to take a step back and take a look at a little bit more of that. That’s why it feels like I can’t believe it’s been a year, and then at the same time, it feels like we’ve been doing this our whole lives already,” says JC.
After more than two years of planning, building out a space, brewing pilot batch recipes, navigating licenses and permits and patiently waiting out delays, Trillium Brewing Co. opened to the public on March 21, 2013. As they celebrate one year of brewing and selling beer, they took a few moments to look back.
“I could see a brewery with everything that a vineyard has, but instead of vines there would be hops, and a big production floor and an event space,” JC told me of his and Esther’s original vision for a farmhouse brewery when I first interviewed him in July of 2011.
It seems unlikely that a brewery half a mile from South Station and the Financial District could invoke the spirit of a farmhouse-style brewery, but that is the idea that has inspired the brewery and the beers that they create.
“When we conceived of Trillium, we started at that vision and then worked back to what was realistic, what was feasible to get started, but we still have that ultimate vision of being a true New England farmhouse brewery,” says JC, who had been homebrewing for about eight years prior to opening Trillium.
The conception for that vision was at Saltwater Farm Vineyard in Stonington, Conn., where JC and Esther were married.
“We’d be there visiting, and say, ‘Oh God, wouldn’t these beams be awesome at a brewery some day,’ or, ‘Look at those tanks, how they’re gleaming in the background.’ It just kind of came together, together,” says Esther.
Step one was signing the lease in January 2011 on a 2,500-square-foot space at 369 Congress St. in Boston’s Fort Point neighborhood. It was, as JC said, “the only shitty building on the block”—graffiti on the walls, an alleyway with overgrown shrubs and litter, and an interior piled high with rubble, bricks, wood and trash.
But the space held potential and the neighborhood fit. Fort Point has been an artist stronghold since the early ‘80s, and in recent years an influx of tech company start-ups have moved in while celebrity chefs and restaurant groups have opened up up and down Congress Street and the surrounding blocks.
“There’s such a symbiosis between the artisan food and brewing movement and it really fits in with the way the arts community functions. There are so many parallels,” says Gabrielle Schaffner, Open Studios Coordinator and former Executive Director of the Fort Point Arts Community.
Brewing is the perfect fusion of art and science: it requires the creativity to come up with recipes that will produce interesting and elegant beers and the precision to create them consistently. For the artistically inclined meticulous geek, brewing is the perfect fit.
“I look at the beers and I can see each JC in each beer,” says Esther. “I might not know the whole recipe, but it just feels like him, like he loves the process.”
Trillium’s core lineup are four beers that he had worked on over the course of homebrewing and pilot brewing, and that their head brewer Adam Goodwin helped to refine and tweak: Trillium, a 6.6% ABV farmhouse ale brewed with pilsner and wheat, American hops and their own farmhouse yeast blend; Fort Point Pale Ale, a 6.5% ABV highly aromatic and hugely hoppy American pale ale; Pot & Kettle, a 7.5% ABV oatmeal porter with an extra depth and richness not found in many other porters, and Wakerobin, a 7.4% ABV farmhouse red ale brewed with rye malted by Valley Malt in Hadley, Mass.
Their relationship with Valley Malt, a small malthouse that unites farmers and brewers by producing malt from local grain, has been essential to helping Trillium achieve its farmhouse-inspired vision. They use a portion of their malt in every speciality and one-off beers, like their anniversary 8.4% ABV double IPA called Mettle, brewed with malted rye, wheat and triticale (a wheat/rye hybrid), the majority of their barrel-aged beers are brewed with 100 percent Valley Malt, and they produce a saison series highlighting different Valley Malt grains. They also use as many local hops as possible, often from Four Star Farms in Northfield, Mass.
“We try to use as many local ingredients as possible to make a beer that is truly local and unique, and in that way we have something unique to give back to the community,” says Goodwin.
That involves not just dealing with, but embracing the variation in raw ingredients from batch to batch or from farm to farm, he says.
“It’s not us trying to adapt with what we get locally, it’s that that’s what we want to do and highlight, is the uniqueness of the local ingredients. It works with the styles we’re trying to accomplish.”
Yeast is often thought of as the soul of a beer and for Trillium, their native yeast culture embodies the concept of what they strive to be: the appreciation for what farmhouse brewing might have been in New England if it had actually evolved here as it did in other traditional beer cultures. Because, as JC says:
“You can’t just order a New England saison yeast from White Labs. You have to go out there and grab it out of the air yourself.
So that’s what we did, except we grabbed it off some wine grapes where Esther and I were married, kept that culture even before we decided to open a brewery, and continued to evolve it.”
And like centuries old New England brewers would have likely done, they put that culture into old wine barrels where it’s fermenting 100 percent Valley Malt saison and producing funky, wild, complex New England beers.
“We’re not trying to create these lactic acid bombs, we’re trying to have a little bit of balance and it seems to be our culture is agreeing with our opinion of that—of making this really interesting depth of character and all these depth of flavors,” says JC.
That complexity and accessibility that can be found in all of their beers appeals to a wide range, from the IPA-averse to the dedicated beer geek, and has drawn a dedicated following, locally and nationally; they were featured on Brew Dog’s show on Esquire, were named one of the Top New Brewers in the World and Fort Point Pale Ale was named one of the Top 50 Best New Beer Releases in the world by RateBeer.
The biggest challenge has been trying to keep up with that demand, an impossible feat at their current small scale. They’re producing about 70 to 80 barrels of beer a month and have a very long list of bottle shops and bars who want to serve their beer, says JC, while they try to meet the demand for beer in the tasting room and of their 22 draft accounts.
“It seems the more beer we produce, the more demand grows. We’re at this positive feedback cycle right now. It’s really energizing, but at the same time it’s incredibly overwhelming too.”
Even after a week of being open, Esther says, they realized they would be outgrowing the space at a far quicker rate than first anticipated. While they’ve added more fermentation tanks over the past year, it’s still not close to being enough, so in order to help start to meet some of the existing demand they are working on evaluating sites in Boston for a future expansion.
Then there are the time constraints: JC still works full-time as the Director of Medical Research at a medical device company, which requires a significant amount of international travel. Esther works part-time for her own business, in-home personal training and residential fitness programs, and runs the day-to-day business management end of Trillium—and they have two kids under the age of three.
Because they can’t be there to see every batch through, finding a head brewer and brewing team that they could trust was essential. They found that in Goodwin, who was working for Tired Hands Brewing Company when he saw the job posting. When he drove up from Philadelphia for the interview, what was supposed to be an hour turned into three or four, while JC and him talked beer and brewing philosophy and Adam sampled one of his native yeast beers.
“We’ve developed a trust that I know he is going to do exactly what is right for the beer, no matter what,” says JC. “He’s been great with calling those shots and a very large portion of our success is due to him.”
They have three full-time and four-part time employees (not including JC and Esther), and a crew of volunteers came to clear out the piles of rubble, wood, and bricks where the tasting room is now, or brew pilot batches at Greentown Labs, a green tech incubator space (formerly in Fort Point, they have since moved to Somerville).
“It sounds crazy, but the best part of my week was waking up at 6 a.m. on Saturday to go to Greentown and brew beer with JC,” Zach Page, now full-time assistant brewer at Trillium, told me last spring.
They might have been taken aback by the wave of support, yet anyone who spoke to JC or Esther in the months leading up to Trillium opening could clearly see their vision and wanted to be a part of it. Their passion for brewing local beer and embedding Trillium within the community was evident—especially in the details of the brewery itself.
“Every detail is a choice that we made,” says Esther. “We’ve brought elements of us and who we are in our home into Trillium and vice versa. It’s all meshed together now.”
The wooden beams for the brewery tasting room bar and the windows behind it are reclaimed from the demolition of 319 A Street, just around the corner from the brewery. JC’s aunt Norma Scott, who runs a business designing and creating custom window treatments, made their curtains from natural canvas painter’s drop cloths. The wooden crates in the tasting room are from JC and Esther’s wedding and South Boston wood craftsman Brian Smith of Smith & Plank created their tap handles, also from the reclaimed wood. They have aged beer, or are currently aging beer, in barrels from South Boston’s Grand Ten Distilling and Bully Boy Distillers. Even part of the brewing system, the glycol chillers, were built by Promethean Power Systems, of Greentown Labs.
Maybe that’s why it’s hard not get a thrill looking at the evolution of Trillium from blueprints on a dusty table in a construction site to a neighborhood brewery where you can stroll in on a Tuesday night and leave with a growler of world-class pale ale. Anyone who has been there along the way feels like they have stake in their success too, and there’s pride in knowing that the beer was made in this city, and for the city.
So while the vision of a brewery on sprawling farmland with gleaming tanks and acres of hops may have to wait a few more years, one year in, Trillium is a reflection of this moment: of the community, of the native yeast and local grains, of the supporters who believed in the vision of a farmhouse-style brewery in Boston, and of the people who have willed a brewery to life.
Visit Trillium Brewing at 369 Congress St. in Fort Point, Boston, follow them on Twitter @trilliumbrewing and find them on Facebook.
