Barrington Brewery, aka Berkshire Mountain Brewery

I'm in Western Massachusetts for the July 4th holiday, and have had the great pleasure of sampling (read: drinking) quite a wide variety of excellent beers. Now, yesterday was a bit rainy and gross outside, though I highly recommend the Berkshire Botanical Garden, even on a rainy day. As my girlfriend put it, "rain is really nice; it's just too bad it's so wet."

This is a small portion of the Berkshire Botanical Gardens. Well worth the admission fee and the time.

Of course, after an afternoon of traipsing around the botanical gardens, and other "aggressively quaint" towns in Western MA, it was a delight to come across the Barrington Brewery & Restaurant, just outside Great Barrington, MA. I've seen their beers in stores here before, but I have to say, I'm really confused by their branding. The label on the ESB I bought clearly says Berkshire Mountain Brewery. And they seem totally OK with this discrepancy - both appear on the aforementioned website. Weird.

Berkshire Mountain Brewers. Or is it?

The label, if I may, also shows a beer and a sun behind it - a clear advertisement of their status as the first brewery on the east coast to go 100% solar to heat the water for their beer. It's an admirable step, and I commend them for it. If only their beers weren't quite so unbalanced.

I purchased an ESB and had it with dinner two nights ago. It had a nice copper color with a fluffy head that stuck around a lot. It didn't, however, have much of an aroma at all. Flavor was nice and refreshing at first, with a great breadiness on the front of each sip. On the back end, though, it was very bitter, and the bitter and sour notes obliterated all else on the palate. After a glass of it, though (a nice 22 oz. bottle has a little under two glasses), the beer got more beery tasting, and I started to pick up a lot more pine hops and some (still quite muted) citrus. As a result, I kind of thought maybe it was just me, or just that particular beer.

So when we drove by the Barrington Brewery & Restaurant, I wanted to go in to try out their beers on tap - maybe the beers just open up better when they haven't been stuffed into a bottle? I ordered the Ice Glen IPA, and found it very refreshing, but similarly one-note to the ESB. It was aggressively bitter and very floral. While I might have detected some malt sweetness that might have come from their roasting of the grain (the beer was a very attractive copper color), the bitterness really got in the way.

Barrington Brewery & Restaurant. Ice Glen IPA, straight from the tap. I wish my phone took better photos.

The head did leave a really nice lacing on the glass that I found very attractive. Unfortunately, the IPA didn't end up opening up like the ESB, which became a little more piney toward the end.

I always like to see a little bit of lacing on the glass. That's purty.

My girlfriend, on the other hand, had a try of the Blackbear [sic.] Stout, which poured jet black and obscured the black lettering on her pint glass. It had some wonderful dark-roast coffee aromas, which was promising. The first thing that hits is that roasted malt and bitter chocolate flavor - it's all of the complexity of deep chocolate and coffee and really burnt caramel, which is pretty amazing given that they were able to tamp down a lot of the traditional malt sweetness that usually makes beers of this color very syrupy and cloying. Unfortunately, what I didn't like about this beer was a very thin mouthfeel - usually something like this just feels a little more substantial in the mouth, maybe a little creamier, and I wasn't getting it.

Is it Barrington Bresery or Berkshire Mountain Brewery?

Is it Black Bear Stout or Blackbear Stout?

Of the three, I would drink the stout again, and I'm still eager to go back and try their other beers. I will say this: they both went really well with the mozzarella sticks we ordered, and the bar itself is very rustic. The bartendrix was smiley and efficient, and commanded authority in the room. And when a passer-through asked if she had any wheat beers, she smiled and said "no, but I can put a slice of lemon in yours, if that'll make you feel better." Now that's someone I want pouring my beer.