E-Malt.com News article: USA, MA: Trillum Brewing to expand

For nearly three decades, two breweries have continuously operated within Boston city limits. Boston Beer Co. maintains a pilot brewery in Jamaica Plain, but the majority of the Samuel Adams products come from Ohio and Pennsylvania. Harpoon Brewery, however, does most of its brewing at its headquarters on the South Boston waterfront, Boston Globe reports.

There has always been room for more, of course. The latest is Trillium Brewing Co. in Fort Point, one of a handful of breweries (now closed) to come along over the years and operate alongside the other two. Founded in 2013, Trillium isn’t built to go toe-to-toe with its Northern Avenue counterpart. There isn’t room for that. The newer spot is tucked into an alley off Congress Street and occupies 2,300 square feet. A long wooden bar runs the length of the room but doesn’t leave much space in front or behind it. Regulars seeking to fill growlers rub elbows with tourists posing in T-shirts in an always-crowded tasting room. The beers are brewed in the back. “People walk in and assume we have a big production space,” says Trillium cofounder JC Tetreault. “There’s no forklift back there or anything.”

Last year, Trillium brewed just over 1,000 barrels of beer. That number could have been even higher, but Trillium missed a deadline to renew its farmer-brewery license for 2014, and was reprimanded by the state with a one-month closure last December. Tetreault takes responsibility for it, but says the demand when the business got back up and running was enough to convince a lender of the need for a larger space.

Tetreault and his wife, Esther, have signed a lease on a 16,000-square-foot space in Canton. Trillium will keep the Fort Point location as a public-facing front and pilot brewery. The new Canton location has the capacity to increase production tenfold in the first year. For the Tetreaults, a bigger brewery has been a long time coming. “We started Trillium knowing it wasn’t sustainable as a business model at that size,” says JC Tetreault. “We started with what we could afford. We knew within a few months we wanted to get bigger.”

The Tetreaults looked at spaces in Boston, but “after quite a lot of effort and time it became pretty obvious we weren’t going to find a space that was production friendly and affordable,” he says. The Canton brewery will contain 4,000 square feet for a retail shop. An already celebrated barrel program will expand. Trillium will continue to self-distribute but ramp up its production of IPAs and pale ales.

“The most interest is in our hop forward beers,” says Tetreault. “I think you’ll see a commensurate production coming with that interest.” Eventually, he says, they would like to find Trillium a rural location to match the brewery’s farmhouse aesthetic. For now, he’s confident that new equipment and a larger production space will lead to better beer, despite larger batches.

“A lot of people are nervous about that because they really love the beers we make now,” says Tetreault. “We have a laser-like focus to maintain the current quality of what comes out of Congress Street.” Trillium Brewing Co.,


26 February, 2015