The first hot rod movement was sparked by people who realized cast off objects still had plenty of potential. Kids walking to school in post WWII America passed junkyards where derelict Model T Fords, relics even then, baked in the sun. An after school job's income could net you one of those heaps, and with it came your first taste of independence. Dropping in a salvaged flathead V-8 could make that old bucket loud, fast, and dangerous. The sexy combination was like flypaper to teenagers and young veterans, and their creativity launched an American culture.
Newly opened PizzaCo, just across the street from Two Roads Brewing Company, is one such hot rod. Once the site of several thoroughly defunct gas stations, the old place has been cleaned up, given a new paint job, and had its own motor swap. The driving engine is now a Marra Forni oven. They call their pizza "Garage Fired," and PizzaCo's edge was hiring world champion Bruno DiFabio to create it.
If you’ve attended any craft beer festival in or around Connecticut over the last several years, there’s a good chance you’ve encountered Lock City Brewing Company. Coming late Spring, you won’t have to attend your favorite beer fest to sample their brews. Lock City Brewing Company is putting the finishing touches on a brand new homebase, right here in Stamford.
Head brewer, Michael Bushnell, and co-founder Patrick Casicolo, (sales and marketing) plan to open their flagship location in the Glenbrook/Springdale section of Stamford. I had a chance to meet with Michael Bushnell recently, where he walked me through the space and talked about their plans.
Washington Prime’s Georgetown location has announced a Tuesday night dinner special. The prime rib roast 2-course dinner includes your choice of salad, a 16 oz. prime rib, and a side of mashed potatoes.
On Wednesday March 29, AMG Catering will offer a “Spring Chicken Class.” Learn to prepare healthy and exciting chicken dishes using seasonal spring ingredients. It costs $90 per person and goes from 7-9pm.
New Haven’s Shell & Bones Oyster Bar has an all new brunch cocktail menu. Four new cocktails will be offered alongside their “Breakfast Bloody Mary.” There will also be three non-alcoholic drinks. Join them for brunch Friday-Sunday after 11am.
Guinness & Co., based in Norwalk CT, and Two Roads Brewing Company, based in Stratford CT, today announce two small batch beers brewed in collaboration and to be released in May of 2017.
The first collaboration will be brewed at the Open Gate Brewery, St James’s Gate in Dublin, Ireland, and will be served to visitors of the Open Gate Brewery taproom. The second beer will be brewed shortly afterwards at Two Roads Brewing Co.’s brewery in Connecticut and will be served to visitors at the brewery.
CTBites' own James Gribbon will once again join the expert judges panel at the third Connecticut Blind Beer Awards on April 15th. The Blind Beer Awards have winners in both Peoples Choice and Experts Choice categories, but no one present knows what beer they've been served until the winners are announced. This more scientific method was developed by the Blind Rhino owners and host Ken Tuccio to keep the awards from being a mere popularity contest.
Beer is traditionally kept on ice, so it only makes sense for BeerConn to take place in a hockey arena. Thus it was again as 50 breweries from Connecticut and beyond came together at the arena at Harbor Yard in Bridgeport, where a single ticket included unlimited tastings, and raised money for Kids Need More, a motivational camp for children with life threatening illnesses.
Two Roads, quickly becoming the most widely known Connecticut beer in the nation after only fours years in existence, was in attendance, along with home state brewers such as Black Hog, Hooker, Relic, Thimble Island, and New England Brewing Company, who showed up with two nationally sought after beers, Coriolis and Locust Reign.
There's magic, though, in the unexpected, and I was excited to see some Connecticut brewers still in their infancy in attendance, including Brass Works (Waterbury), Fairfield Craft Ales (Stratford), Brewport (Bridgeport) and Hanging Hills (Hartford).
Fresh beer isn't always the best beer. As arguments for freshness go, you could make one for juicy, resinous IPAs, and you certainly don't want to drink any hot can of Busch Light which rolls out from underneath a car seat, but as the American craft beer industry matures, it's beginning to make beers meant to do the same. Stone, the Escondido, California brewer of undeniable arrogance, will shy away from claims of being the first to put "born on" dates on their bottles and cans, but they were the first to use "Enjoy By" as the actual name of a beer. The Enjoy By series of IPAs (followed by a date on each) was to be taken so seriously Stone would come and retrieve any unsold beers from retailers.
This is why it was so interesting when Stone Enjoy After 10.31.16 hit shelves - in 2015. This week I opened the bottle I bought over a year ago. Here's what happened.
Two Roads Brewing of Stratford has announced their plans to add a 25,000 square foot expansion to their brewery specifically to create sour and barrel-aged beers. Situated on 2.5 acres of newly acquired land adjoining the existing brewery's hop yard and music venue, the brewhouse will have a 120-person capacity tasting room overlooking both the brewing operations, and a wetlands preserve.
Sour beers such as Framboise Noir Black Raspberry Lambic, Urban Funk Wild Ale made with yeast from Superstorm Sandy, and Worker’s Stomp White Wine Barrel-Aged Saison will see increased production, along with Hexotic Tropical Lambic, which won a gold medal at the Great American Beer Festival in Denver, Colorado this October. Hexotic spends 28 months in oak, and was fermented with "Brett C" (brettanomyces clausenii). Six different types of fruit were added during fermentation, including orange, passion fruit, mangosteen, soursop (aka gaunabana), guava, and mango.
In which I hope to survive this column's publishing.
Most beer is best when it is as fresh as possible. The ability to buy beer at the source of its manufacture has completely changed how Americans interact with their brew, and it's given brewers the chance to utilize ingredients with increasing fragility of flavor. The concept is not a new one, really. In order to ensure quality, macrobrewers have spent untold dollars figuring out how long their beer lasts under different conditions, and have been printing Born On dates on their cans for well over a decade. On the other end, small brewer whale-chasers have approached a lunatic fringe in threatening to pour their own IPAs down the drain should they have been bottled and sold in more than the space of a workday.
For the next few weeks in this space I'll be attempting to find out how long certain beers can be cellared like fine wines. What happens to them? How do they change, and what's it like to drink them? I'll be trying beers from several brewers; some which have been made specifically to drink after resting, but most decidedly not.
You may have noticed we've been playing around with the structure of Friday Froth for the past several months. This space has been everything from event coverage, to brewpub openings, to a travel diary, but this week we're going back to something more like a classic Froth. I began writing this column way back in ye olden days of 2009 with the idea of expressing a renaissance.
The growth of American craft brewing was every bit as compelling as the culinary scene in terms of new ideas, personalities, and dedication to ingredients and flavors, but most people were still pretty lost when it came to picking out something new to try. Glance at the patrons in front of the craft case at the rare well stocked liquor store at the time, and they'd be wearing expressions like someone at MoMA trying to decide if what they were looking at was the intentional work of an artist, or construction debris. I started Froth just to give people a heads up. So, without going on too long I hope, that's what we're doing today.
Last Friday, around the time the afternoon crowd was clicking on last week's column, I was overflowing with the desire to get out of town. A neighbor of mine, a semi-recent immigrant from eastern Europe, was heading home. In the years of our acquaintance I'd only known him to go two places: his day job as a carpenter, and his back yard. His whole idea of Connecticut, his entire concept of the U.S., for all I know, would be worksites, the highway, and a quarter acre of manicured grass. He was utterly unconcerned, but I was tragedy stricken - and determined to get out and do... something.
Just like in a movie script, that's when the phone rang.
"Sorry this is last minute, man," the caps lock Wisconsin accent told me who it was immediately. "But I need a trip to the casino. I got the room paid for, you just bring your liver."
I didn't really have the money to play with, it was Friday rush hour on I-95, and I try to avoid casinos in general.
"Sure. Let me pack." Let's see what happens, I thought. I am a leaf on the wind.
Although the end results were largely indistinguishable, the casino was marginally more entertaining than feeding those same $20 bills to sea gulls. I was neither keen to go back the next day, nor on the prospect of a two hour, day-wasting drive home. It was my turn to provide the inspiration:
A lot of the time, when you write about food and beer, you realize the compelling truths in a story start with the people. Case in point, Brewport Brewing Co. If you've driven on I-95 through Bridgeport any time in the past several months, you have probably seen eye-searing electronic billboards announce its impending arrival as part of their scroll. The waiting is over, and the entire month of August has been designated a public "sneak preview" of the pizza-centric brewpub. I dropped by unannounced to get a taste of what we have in store. Here's your first look.
Brewport started out as an idea in the mind of its president, Bruce Barrett, of Barrett Outdoor Communications, hence the billboards. (You may also recognize his IWagePeace.org billboards.) The brewpub is located directly off exit 27 on 95N, below one of Barrett's billboards, and roughly at the radiant point in the center of the giant loop made by the exit 27A connector. The easy access, and the huge mural of brewing equipment painted on the building's side, make it hard to miss. Bruce and his brother John purchased the building in 2000, and it continued its life as a distribution center for the Fairfield County News for years before they contacted their longtime friend - and brewery manager at BAR New Haven - Jeff Browning.
New Belgium Brewing Company of Fort Collins, Colorado, is now a month into making their beer available in Connecticut for the first time. Thanks to an extremely effective initial round of distribution, I've seen their canoe-shaped tap handles popping up all over Fairfield and New Haven counties. Not too long ago, before New Belgium built their new brewery in Asheville, NC, the beer was only scantily available much east of the mountain time zone. It was during this time that I went full-on Smokey And The Bandit and made a beer run from Georgia to Colorado and back again. It started with a heartbreak.
My trip to Colorado, like that of the Conquistadors, began with an expedition to Mexico. Specifically, an airline ticket to Cancun for spring break. The father of one of my friends in the history program at the University of Georgia was pilot, and I could afford the ticket to Mexico because it was free. The five of us who were going planned to spend the savings by investing in cheap accommodations, cheaper booze, and lasting skin damage. I was hard at work polishing my lustrous C average in college Spanish all the way up to a gleaming B-minus when my hopes were torched like ships of Cortez. The promised five tickets materialized as two tickets, and I hadn't made the cut.
Maybe it's just the freshness of a mind before it reaches pickled adulthood, but childhood memories seem more permanent. I can't remember breakfast on most days, but I recall hopping on bikes with a few friends, ditching our mother-mandated helmets, and riding down to Vic's Variety on Paradise Green in Stratford to buy Crybabies and play Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on a stand up, four player arcade game.
Nintendo and Sega Genesis had killed video game arcades as dead as iTunes killed record stores until four guys in Williamsburg thought "What if we bring them back, but with beer?" That was 2004, and in the ensuing years the Barcade franchise has spread around New York, to New Jersey, Philly, and now, New Haven. It was once again time to get my Hadouken! on.
Travel time driving to Barcade is variable, in my case 3 hours in traffic. But by the time I arrived I was seriously ready to blow something up. Centipede, Galaga, Punch Out, four player X-Men and Ninja Turtles, Ms. Pac Man... take your pick, they're all still 25-cents to play.
Food halls are all the craze in NYC right now. But in lower Fairfield County, food halls are completely missing and the closest one (the first in Westchester) is in Mount Kisco’s bustling downtown area and is totally worth the 40-plus minute drive to fill your bellies and thus, nourish your soul.
Exit 4 Food Hall opened in February and it’s already a Main Street hot spot. In an area packed with good eateries and ultra-cool bars, Exit 4 is a destination. It’s casual, it’s great for just about any occasion, and with nine food/drink counters there are lots of options for those days when you’re feeling a bit picky. On weekend nights it can get loud, and busy, but that’s part of its charm. There’s a sense of community here and you might even make a few foodie friends while you’re chowing down on food and chugging a brew. I was recently invited to try some of the food and the brew.
If, in an alternate world, you'd bought stock in Kent Falls Brewing Co. the first time you read about the small, Connecticut based brewer here on CTBites, you'd be rich by now. The brewery isn't actually public in the financial sense, but it will welcome the public to its farm in Kent, Conn. for the first time on June 11. Kent Falls beer has previously only been available on tap, in bottles at a few shops, and at single farmer's market. All that changes this summer, and anyone up for a drive to the NW corner will be able to buy it bottled at the source, Saturdays from 11a.m.-5p.m., with a focus on special releases like brewery-only IPAs and barrel aged beers. A special bottle release is planned for the grand opening on the 11th.
Kent Falls has seen its popularity skyrocket lately and, as I've said severaltimesbefore, the beer justifies the acclaim. The announcement of their new retail sales plan ended up being just the push I needed to finally visit their brewery and the working farm in which it's seated. Here is your first look.
Feel free to argue with me in the comments, but New England Brewing Companyis currently the biggest whale in Connecticut. Unlike the white whale which drove Ahab mad and dragged him to his doom, no number of obsessive trackers will soon be bringing it down. NEBCO finished doubling the capacity of its brewery over the winter and in short order released a huge batch of its more sought after beers to multiple bars just in time to coincide with St. Patrick's day.
My base of operations that night was Walrus+Carpenter in Black Rock because they were having a Van Morrison tribute band, and the list of things I will fight you over is not long, but it includes "Astral Weeks." I was several Supernauts and a long awaited Gandhi-Bot deep when I sensed a disturbance in the force, as if thousands of apps had fired up at once, and looked up to watch a steady trickle of bros and bro-ettes flow in, order no drinks, and peruse not a single menu. They just waited. These, then, were the Untappd zombies. Cannibalistic brain-eating being so 20th century, the horde was utterly uninterested in music, roast pig, fried chicken, or a tap list filled with excellent beer - they wanted cheeeeeck-iiiiinnnnsss. It was five minutes before the hour, and the tap was about to open on Fuzzy Baby Ducks. Thumbs hovered - twitching, aching - over phones.
Flowers are popping up everywhere this spring, even in our beer. Tomorrow, May 7th, will see a special bottle release at Two Roads Brewing Co. in Stratford, featuring their newest creation, Roads Garden. The spring Nor'yeaster event will also include limited supplies of Framboise Noir, a black raspberry lambic, and Road 2 Rouen, the brewery's "wild, Franco-Belgian IPA," based on Road 2 Ruin DIPA.
A sold-out, ticketed preview event was held this past Monday, when the brewery's tasting room is regularly closed, and CTBites was able to taste several of Two Roads' smaller production run beers, paired with "re-imagined junk food," via event partner Marcia Selden catering.
There’s a new Latin pulse beating on West Park Place in Stamford and it goes by the name ACUARIO (Aquarium, in Spanish.) Funky, warm and charming, the new Peruvian jaunt is the latest culinary jewel from the treasure box of Saida and Nicolas Oshiro, who opened the original ACUARIO in Port Chester in the 1980s. This new ACUARIO is in the worthy hands of Oshiro offspring, Eduardo, and his wife, Beth, and they know what’s cookin’. We’ve dined at ACUARIO twice and each time the restaurant has been packed, with many patrons speaking Spanish - ALWAYS a good sign.
This March only marks a year since Kent Falls Brewing Company released their first beer, and somehow it doesn't feel too early to call them "renowned." The Litchfield County operation has already become one of Connecticut's most productive, releasing 37 different beers and variants in their first ten months. That level of output is preposterous, and all the more remarkable not just due to the high volume of recipes, but for their excellence. Small wonder then, that Little Pub in Ridgefieldchose to host the Kent Falls crew for a rare beer pairing dinner event early this February.
