Connecticut’s craft brew revival halfway to 100 bottles

Dan Tazzioli and Isabel Lynch in October 2014 at the Two Roads and GW beer stand. Greenwich resident Todd Myers created GW Beer based on a recipe in a journal of George Washington. Dan Tazzioli and Isabel Lynch in October 2014 at the Two Roads and GW beer stand. Greenwich resident Todd Myers created GW Beer based on a recipe in a journal of George Washington. Photo: Nelson Oliveira / Nelson Oliveira Photo: Nelson Oliveira / Nelson Oliveira Image 1 of / 39 Caption Close Connecticut’s craft brew revival halfway to 100 bottles 1 / 39 Back to Gallery

As of this weekend’s Ninety9Bottles craft beer fest in South Norwalk, Connecticut was still more than 50 labels short of the century mark for homegrown brewers. But years after a burst of entrepreneurship, new bottles are on the way for future festivals.

From Stamford to Bridgeport and north to New Milford, a new wave of craft brewers enters the summer of 2017 building on an earlier boom that started in advance of Connecticut authorizing in 2012 brewery taprooms. In southwestern Connecticut, joining established brands like Charter Oak, Half Full and Two Roads are myriad new ones with names that intrigue: Bad Sons, Church Owl, Hell or High Water, Housatonic River and Nod Hill to name a few.

The new brewers arrive even as the summer craft brew festival season kicks off in earnest, starting in mid-May with the “Pour at the Shore” event at Stratford’s Short Beach, which included a home brew competition. The Ninety9Bottles festival wraps up Sunday at Oyster Shell Park along the Norwalk River; on Saturday, Rowayton planned to host the ShakesBeer craft- and home-brew fundraiser supporting the Shakespeare on the Sound program.

The slings and arrows of misfortune to starting a brewery today? Local microbreweries and taprooms agree regulatory requirements represent a sea of troubles they must traverse — particularly at the U.S. Department of Treasury and its new Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, with TTB agents under siege from craft breweries, brewpubs and distilleries nationally.

Bad Sons represents the second brewpub concept for Bill and Mark DaSilva, who were Connecticut’s earliest vanguard of modern craft brewers in the early 1990s with the Southport Brewing Co. and its Gold Coast SBC brewpubs. Taking their name from an acronym of Housatonic River valley towns, Bad Sons hopes to open in Derby this summer, but like other upstarts is waiting on regulatory approvals, with TTB providing no inkling on when they will come through as the agency plows through its backlog of pending applications.

“The Feds have been bombarded,” Bill DaSilva said. “Without that license I can’t even brew.”

Willing to learn, able to move

Stratford’s Two Roads Brewery, founded in 2012, has given entrepreneurs throughout southwestern Connecticut an “exhibit A” as to what a successful taproom can mean in drawing visitors to their towns, amid a continuing expansion for the brewery flush with cash. But it still represents a bumpy road, including for Church Owl Beer, whose founder and Greenwich native Taylor Grothe had to delay the opening of a taproom in Stratford as she went through the zoning process; and Fairfield Craft Ales, which opened near Two Roads after raising money on crowdfunding sites.

“It took about six months after filing for our federal license to receive it, and about two months to get our state license,” said Fairfield Craft Ales co-founder Mike Barruso. “We were self-financed; hunted around for used equipment and picked it up and assembled it ourselves; and did much of the build-out on our own as well.”

Peter Cowles, CEO of Aspetuck Brew Lab in Bridgeport, agreed.

“As the first brewery to operate in Bridgeport in over 70 years, we faced many challenges with local regulations and the general lack of knowledge by city officials of what a production brewery with a taproom is all about,” Cowles said. “That said, city officials were willing to learn and we were able move forward, but the approval process (and) political system is not built for speed at the local or state level. And the fees we faced along the way were endless.”

Two years ago, Mark and Tess Veracious Szamatulski opened the Veracious brewpub in Monroe, having already run the Maltose Express craft brew supplies store there. The couple said navigating zoning laws was the most difficult element of launching Veracious. It was time they would have preferred to have spent perfecting their processes to produce consistently great brews, with 15 to 18 on tap at any single point.

Still, the process has not deterred a new wave of closet home brewers from giving it a go commercially, including Nod Hill Brewery, which is readying to open on Route 7 just north of Ridgefield’s Branchville crossroads on Route 7. For those that have cleared the regulatory process, the challenge of transitioning to a hospitality enterprise is now looming large.

“The toughest thing for us was that in the initial stages of the process, my co-founder and I were both still running another business (Riverside Fence) that was busy, time-demanding, and hard to step away from,” said David Kaye of Nod Hill Brewery. “We had to carve out a lot of extra hours to give attention to all the things necessary to make Nod Hill a reality. Now that we are a few months from opening, I have transitioned into doing brewery-related work full time.”

For those who aspire to distribute their beers through package stores and restaurants, vigilance for any opportunities to gain visibility is ever on the mind. After starting Charter Oak Brewing in 2011, New Canaan resident Scott Vallely kept at the ready a cooler of iced bottles in his car for on-the-spot marketing should he chance by an establishment, styling himself a “gypsy brewer” in those days. Vallely is in the process of establishing a Charter Oak taproom in Danbury.

‘Great breweries within miles’

Connecticut establishments are coming around on the opportunities before them to sell the craft brews produced in their own backyards — but slowly.

“As a self-distributing brewery, another challenge has been the lack of support of local beer by many establishments,” Cowles said. “While many area buyers embrace high-quality, fresh, locally brewed beer, there are others that are unwilling to change their buying habits and don’t support Connecticut beer. There are many great beer choices out there right now — from all states — but we have some really great breweries within miles of where we live.”

In Stamford, nearly five years after Half Full Brewery poured its first pint, the craft brewer has been overhauling its own offerings, even as Lock City Brewing across town along with others a few miles out farther — nudging the craft brew census to the halfway mark of 99 labels of beer in all.

“One of the great benefits now with all these (breweries) opening is there is a lot more visibility, a lot more awareness for what we’re doing,” said Jordan Giles, director of branding and customer experience at Half Full. “People walk in now and they ... understand, because of so many other people having opened along the way. It’s become a lot easier.”

— Includes prior reporting by Daniel Tepfer and Keila Torres Ocasio.

Alex.Soule@scni.com; 203-964-2236; www.twitter.com/casoulman