About the Beer: Cran You Dig It?!

/

By Greg Carlson

Alright Pilgrims, not gonna beat around the bush on this one - this is our Thanksgiving Beer. This is the beer we want you to drink on and around Thanksgiving. As a Massachusetts brewery, we embrace the obligation to incorporate the Commonwealth’s top crop* into a seasonal offering, and like many of our peers, we also embrace the cranberry’s natural tartness and decided to employ a sour beer as our vehicle to do so.

The thing about Thanksgiving is, I’ve got two controversial opinions on it:

  1. It’s actually the best holiday. It’s appropriately sandwiched between Halloween and Christmas with none of the overhead of either. No costumes, no gifts, no months-long buildup. Your mom’s not sharing Facebook articles warning you about razor blades in your kids’ turkey. It never falls on a Tuesday. You eat a lot, drink a lot, watch some football, fall asleep, then take three more days off of work. It’s flawless.

  2. Homemade cranberry sauce is better than the canned stuff. It’s like comparing instant ramen to, like, ramen-joint ramen. We can romanticize the store-bought varieties all we want, but let’s be real here - the homemade ones have way more and way better flavor. Actual spices! It’s great!

And actual spices also found their way into our beer! Inspired by the real deal cranberry sauce, we included a gentle amount of cardamom** to add a subtle herbal and gingery kick to complement the cranberry (and boy, does it. Cranberry and cardamom are like Best Flavor Friends 4 Lyfe).

As for the rest of the Here’s How We Did It, you can just review the My Blue Heaven post. Same process, but with cranberry - straight from Decas Cranberry in Carver, Mass. - instead of blueberry, and a moderately bigger and darker grain bill to help keep the tartness at bay. 

And that’s it! Here’s your delightfully uncomplicated blog post to pair with your delightfully uncomplicated holiday. Come get a crowler and share it with your family.

*I actually looked this up, and technically cranberries are Massachusetts’s second biggest crop, topped only by…greenhouse and nursery commodities? That can’t be right. What even IS that.

**Our team member Anna gets credit for recommending cardamom as the spice addition. Great job, Bananna!