Best Beer Ratings
People often ask me, what is the best brewery in Connecticut, and my answer is “It depends on what you are looking for”. I have two different ways to rate; beer and setting, so I will start with beer. Keep in mind that I am all about IPAs, so these ratings are slanted toward the best IPAs.
1) Fox Farm (Salem)
2) Counterweight (Cheshire)
3) Tribus (Milford)
4) Alvarium (New Britain)
5) Tox (New London)
6) New Park (West Hartford)
7) Five Churches (New Britain)
8) Kinsmen (Southington)
9) Connecticut Valley (South Windsor)
10) Relic (Plainville)
11) Kent Falls (Kent)
12) Beer’d (Stonington)
13) Hopmeadow (Avon)
14) Back East (Bloomfield)
15) Hooker (Bloomfield)
16) Sufridge (Essex)
Best in Massachusettes
1) Treehouse (Charlton) – No doubt the best beer in New England
2) Trillium (Boston)
3) Aeronaut
Adaptive Reuse Ratings
I really enjoy breweries that are created using Adaptive Reuse, which means they took something old and creatively made it into a brewery. All those on my list had to preserve something from the old as opposed to just setting up shop in a large vacant building. All my favorite settings are reused spaces.
My #1 pick is Newsylum, which took an old abandoned Mental health facility and built a brewery in the middle building leaving all the other buildings around it abandoned and creepy.
Here is the full top 10 ranked as follows:
1) Newsylum – mental health facility (referred to as Insane Asylum when open)
2) Kinsmen* – bolt factory
3) Bad Dog – fire station
4) Spacecat Brewing – factory
5) Hog River – typewriter factory
6) Five Churches* – coat factory
7) Bad Sons – die casting factory
8) Witch Doctor – mill
9) Clocktown – Seth Thomas clock factory
10) Powder Hollow – wool processing and shaker style bonnets
Honorable mention for
Elicit, but there was a restaurant there before, it was not abandoned.
Gray Sail – an old Victorian home (in RI)
*These are also on my top beer ratings list