Bryan Greenhagen, who founded Mystic Brewery in Chelsea, Massachusetts, outside of Boston, compares his brewery to the French bread company, Poilâne circa 1932. When Parisians started mass producing white bread after World War II, the bread maker Lionel Poilâne continued making an artisan country loaf, “what they would consider real French bread,” says Greenhagen. “There was this big campaign—much like our craft-beer campaign against light fizzy yellow beer—against the white loaf of bread.”
Greenhagen’s beers are anything but fizzy yellow lagers. His lineup of farmhouse-inspired ales is comprised 90 percent of barrel-fermented saisons. Much like Lionel Poilâne, he’s committed to old-school techniques in what’s become a very industrialized sector. “We went back in time,” Greenhagen says about his brewing practices. “So basically, the realization [is] that people use their local yeast and propagate their own.”
Greenhagen and crew developed a house yeast strain when they were waiting for their brewing license to come in, establishing early on that Mystic’s focus would be on fermentation. The brewing license arrived in 2010, and since then Mystic has been explaining to customers and fellow brewers why a brewhouse did not appear. To hone in on what he thinks is the most important part of the brewing process, Greenhagen contract brews his beers off-site in eighteen-barrel batches, transfers wort to a truck, and drives it back to Mystic for fermentation. “If you want to spend your money on barrels and time [on cultivating yeast],” Greenhagen says, “then it’s a great thing not to spend another $500,000 on a brewing system.”
