Step 4

Before I left for my trip to Boston last week, I put some serious time and energy into developing a
To Do List:
1) Hang with old friends
2) Drink good beer
3) Combine steps 1 and 2
4) Repeat steps 1-3
I don’t suppose I need to brag about how successful I was accomplishing this.

I had five days and about four times as many places I wanted to see (trans: beers I wanted to drink). Say what you will about Boston, but they do their beer up damn fine. What’s most impressive is the diversity of brews made there.

That little barley grain is just the cutest

We started off the trip with a visit to Redbones, which is a rib place for most people, but a beer bar for me. (Also, hush puppies that’ll give you a glimpse of the deep fryer that is heaven.) My first pick had to be a Jack D’Or from Pretty Things Beer and Ale Project. Pretty Things isn’t your typical brewery, in that they don’t have a brewery. They’re gypsies. They get up at 3am and brew in other brewers’ breweries before the generous owners need to open up and use their own equipment.

More importantly, they make beers no one else is brewing. Jack D’Or, their flagship beer, is what they call a Saison Americain…which is not really a thing, but it is now. Pretty Things abhors “styles” the way cats abhor vacuums. They like to let the beer speak for itself, and Jack D’Or says, “Mais oui! Je suis delicieuse!” So, what is it then? I’d say a sort of hoppy saison with spicy notes and a bitter backbone coated in gold.

Step 4 WITH a Cocoa Sutra. Whoa!

My friends showed me to a new brewery in Somerville (across the river somewhere) called Aeronaut Brewing. It’s located in a big warehouse, where it appears some other small businesses had set up shop. The seating was a few long picnic tables with board games on a shelf nearby, and the place was so community-minded and friendly and homemade and hip that I almost spontaneously learned how to knit.

Their saison was also great, as was the second beer I had there, the Cocoa Sutra. This beer was moderately difficult to order at the bar; somewhere between Little Sumpin’ Sumpin’ and Sweet Action. Basically it tastes like how it sounds, so it was also a little embarrassing to drink, too; somewhere between buying condoms from behind the counter of the drug store and going to a sex shop. So, it was good.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Harpoon Brewery’s IPA, my go-to beer for the years I lived in Boston. On an afternoon to ourselves, Ben and I wandered around downtown Boston, circumventing the Common, watching people make fools of themselves on those little brass ducklings, dodging the unnervingly aggressive Canada geese — normal tourist stuff. Also normal tourist stuff: needing to pee. But this time Dunkin Donuts’ bathroom was out of order. We did what we had to do: we went to The Tam.

Dirty taps, dirtier bathrooms…I love it

The Tam is a dive bar near Emerson College where I went to grad school (at Emerson, not The Tam). It is also where I spent obscene amounts of time watching other people play Big Buck Hunter (Warning; Mild Animal Violence) and drinking Harpoon IPAs. Granted, Harpoon tasted a little funky there, but I didn’t dwell on it. After getting drunk on those unusually large and strangely foul smelling bottles of Brubaker, an icy Harpoon was heaven-sent.

Harpoon still tastes like Boston to me, so while it doesn’t speak to the diversity of beer there, it does speak of home. All of these beers seem to stand proud of where they came from, as I was once proud to call Boston my home, too. There are so many more I want to tell you about, but I’m running out of space and have almost finished my beer. Do you have a favorite Boston-area beer I left out?