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Pick Six: Memories & Principles, with J.C. and Esther Tetreault of Trillium

For their six-pack, J.C. and Esther Tetreault of Trillium select some firmly hoppy beers that reflect memories and collective experiences as well as shared approaches to brewing and hospitality.

Jamie Bogner Dec 3, 2022 - 11 min read

Pick Six: Memories & Principles, with J.C. and Esther Tetreault of Trillium Primary Image

Illustration: Jamie Bogner

Agricultural connections run deep for J.C. and Esther Tetreault, and for this New England brewing power couple (and now farm owners), memorable and influential beers are inextricably tied to the land that has helped produce them. It’s no surprise that they feel a kinship to brewers who hold similar values and pursue similar strategies, and this six-pack of beers in many ways reflects those ties that connect them.

Connecting on values is core for Trillium—beers may have similar flavors, beautifully executed, but that next step into the question of “why” is the thing that drives them. They’ve aligned their brewery, restaurant, and farm to focus on creating healthy, sustainable food systems, and they’re increasingly moved by fellow brewers and beers that express a similar passion.

“As craft beer has matured, we have the opportunity to dig even deeper into our communities and into the agricultural roots, where it all comes from,” says J.C. Tetreault.

Fonta Flora Bloody Butcher

(Morganton, North Carolina)
“Todd Boera at Fonta Flora and I have been talking about getting together to make a beer at some point with our own farm-grown ingredients. He’s getting to the point now where he’s got real quantities to use. And this coming season will be our first real harvest at our own farm as well. Todd is growing this really cool heirloom variety of corn called Bloody Butcher. And there’s another Southern variety of red corn, called Jimmy Red, that’s used by a lot of Southern distillers. We grew a test plot of that last year, and it’s going to be something that we get integrated into a handful of our beer recipes as well as into our food program. Corn is going to be sort of a staple crop for Trillium, as it has been for so many different cultures.

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“Todd sent me some of the mixed-ferm beer made with the Bloody Butcher corn that he grew on his farm. Like us, he is really focusing on proper regenerative practices, as well as flavor and nutrition and help with the soil using regenerative agriculture. All that comes through in the Bloody Butcher beer—it doesn’t just say it on a label; the quality, the flavor, and the intention really come through in the glass as well. Todd and his team did an incredible job with Bloody Butcher.” —J.C.

Russian River STS Pils

(Santa Rosa, California)
“Beers for us are experiential. It’s what’s happening at that moment in time. For me, right now—I shouldn’t even say right now because it’s been a few years—I’m on a pilsner kick, even though I never used to think I wanted to drink pilsner.

“The weekend after J.C. and I got engaged, 13 and a half years ago, we went out to California, and we went to Russian River. That was so cool. At that time, obviously, J.C. and I were just aspirational in our dreams.

“Then I did an event with Natalie a few years ago. She asked me to host a women-in-beer dinner with her in Colorado. That was the first time I tried their STS Pils, which is just such a beautiful beer. It’s so clean with a super-deft balance of firm malt. But the malt is never center stage. It’s there as a structural background. I like the bitterness—I want pilsner to be clean with a little bite, as opposed to biscuity and malty. It’s a beer-nerd brewer thing to say, but they have the perfect water profile. It’s that third leg of the tripod that sits down on top of that really beautiful fermentation.

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“Then we were invited to Firestone Walker Invitational, and that was the first time I had Pivo Pils, and I was like, ‘Oh, this beer is incredible.’ So now (if they are reading this) I would love to try the mashup of the two, STiVO Pils [a collab between Russian River and Firestone Walker].” —Esther

The Veil Culminate

(Richmond, Virginia)
“I’m happy to say that my friend Matt Tarpey from The Veil was one of a handful of friends who came around when we made the call to say, “Hey, does anybody want to fly out to the Boston area and just be there and celebrate with us for our first spontaneous beer knockout?” We had a spur of the moment—I was going to say spontaneous—party. And then fast-forward to how many years later? You know, it takes five-ish years to get your first one ready to drink, and Matt was well ahead of us. He sent me his three-year gueuze-inspired blend, Culminate. It’s an incredible American interpretation of spontaneous beer. Maybe it’s a running theme here, but the firm hoppiness in their spontaneous blends is very much appreciated. You read all the books and talk to spontaneous brewers, and different people have different opinions on the impact of hops. But until we started to brew it ourselves, we did not realize how big of an impact those aged hops have. And theirs are front and center but never heavy handed, never cloying. It’s very impressively done, not only within the base beer and the individual threads, but in what comes together in the final blend, and then aging and conditioning in glass afterward. It’s an incredible achievement.” —J.C.

Fox Farm Gather

(Salem, Connecticut)
“I’m going to pick another pilsner, but I’m going to go with a local pilsner that’s not ours—Gather by Fox Farm. They’re members of the Northeast Grainshed Alliance with us. When we made Thresh, our 100 percent locally grown collaboration beer with them, Zach [Adams] and his family came up, and he brought Gather to share with us. It’s another really clean, beautiful, German-style pilsner. And sharing that beer as we were celebrating the beer that we made together was just another nice moment in time. So Gather, for me, is associated with a memory.”

“I think it’s really great meeting other people who are so well aligned with what we believe we want beer and hospitality to be, and especially with our core values. One of the things that drives us is agricultural sustainability, and Fox Farm has their own set of values that guide them with the same foundational principles. We shared that, and sharing those values and talking about how we wanted to reflect the values in our beer together, it was nice to drink something that they were doing in the same way.” —Esther

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Other Half and Rothaus Zipfeltännle

(Brooklyn, New York and Grafenhausen-Rothaus, Germany)
“As the story goes, for Other Half, Rothaus Pils is one of their non–Other Half go-to beers. They’ve been very vocal about it for a very long time—so much so that eventually Rothaus got word of it, and eventually, they ended up making a beer together—Zipfeltännle. Other Half worked with them to bring over some bales of whole-cone hops for them to use in the beer that they produced in Brooklyn.

“Sam [Richardson] and I will send each other beers that we’re particularly proud of. Zipfeltännle was included, and I think it was only a four-pack. After I had two sips of that first can of beer, I immediately texted him to send me a case, please, because I wanted to share it with the rest of the team here. But I want to have enough for myself, too. It was just such an incredible beer. The hops were the magic piece that made it that much more special, on top of an incredibly executed pilsner. That brings us back to the agricultural roots, and you know, you can’t fake that stuff. It’s such an incredibly important part of what we do.” —J.C.

Port Brewing Mongo Double IPA

(San Marcos, California)
“I’m changing now, and am going to go nostalgic and hoppy. Back when J.C. and I lived in Brookline and were just homebrewing, that was the start of super-hoppy beers for us and my appreciation of them. We lived up the street from the Publick House, which is on Beacon Street in Brookline, and went there two or three nights a week for dinner. They’ve got an expansive menu and expansive beer selection, but at that time, for where hoppy beer was and my appreciation for it, Port Brewing Mongo was my go-to. If there was nothing new and interesting on the menu—if there wasn’t a standout—I was ordering Mongo every time. Whatever you might expect the supply chain from California to be relative to local breweries, save for maybe [Ithaca’s] Flower Power, local beers weren’t available as reliably and regularly as Mongo was at the Publick House.

“It was just so vivid and bright and fresh, and there was a fruitiness to it. It was the freshest, most intensely hoppy but still easy-to-drink beer on the menu on a perennial basis. That, for me, was what an IPA at that time was supposed to taste like.” —Esther

Jamie Bogner is the cofounder and editorial director of Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine®. Email him at [email protected].

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