At the age of 24, Tyler Guilmette of Northampton has accomplished something many home brewing enthusiasts only dream of, his handcrafted beer is now available for purchase in various bars, restaurants and stores across the Pioneer Valley.
Guilmette first became interested in craft beer while attending Stonehill College, where he ran on the track team and studied math and business. He made the leap to brewing his own beer in 2009 after stopping in at Beer & Winemaking Supplies in Northampton, a local home brew store he said he passed by every day on the way home from work.
Now, four years later, he’s made another leap: his newly minted brewing company – dubbed Brewmaster Jack after his great-grandfather, also a home brewer – has released its first professional offering, Stray Dog Lager.
A smooth amber lager, Stray Dog could not have been released at a more opportune time. It comes as the winter begins to take its leave and is every bit as crisp and refreshing as the spring days on which it will be consumed.
Brewed with both American and European ingredients, the beer is superbly well balanced with a sweet, floral aroma and slightly toasty bite imparted by Munich malts.
“It was a recipe I had messed around with, and I knew the taste I wanted to get from personal preference,” said Guilmette, “I wanted it to appeal to the regular beer drinker.”
And apparently, it has. According to Guilmette, sales of Stray Dog Lager have been consistently high, stunted only briefly by the snowstorm at the beginning of March.
The beer is available at about sixteen different locations locally, some of which include Provisions and The Toasted Owl in Northampton, TruBeer in Easthampton, The Spirit Haus and the Moan & Dove in Amherst and Ryan and Casey Liquors in Greenfield.
Guilmette produces the beer by contracting out of Paper City Brewery in Holyoke, where he essentially rents out their facility by the batch. He said brewing in this manner allows him to circumvent the need for his own brewery and helps to cut down on a substantial amount of additional overhead costs, though he still has to provide the bottles, kegs, packaging, labels and ingredients.
A strong supporter of the shop local movement, Guilmette acquires almost all of those extra supplies from local businesses. Brewmaster Jack is one of only six brewing companies in New England which uses locally-malted grains, produced at a malt house located right next door in Hadley, Mass. The bottles come from Ander Bottle in Springfield and the packaging materials are printed in neighboring East Longmeadow, Guilmette’s hometown.
“It’s really important to buy local,” said Guilmette. “If it only costs 20 cents more for a loaf of bread, why not buy it from the guy down the street?”
The only ingredients that are not locally derived are the hops used for bittering, flavoring and as a preservative in the beer; those are grown in Washington state.
In addition to brewing all of the beer, Guilmette also packages, promotes and self-distributes it, a veritable one-man brewery. He can regularly be found running around to various package stores and bars, offering samples of his product and delivering cases of it from the back of his pickup truck. One night, he even found himself behind the bar of L’Espalier in Boston, hand-labeling bottles on the spot as they were sold.
In June, he will be pouring at the American Craft Beer Festival in Boston, where he hopes to debut his India Pale Ale recipe.
“I don’t want to rush it, I want to make sure the recipe is solid” said Guilmette of his I.P.A. “The festival organizers like you to have at least four different beers to sample at the event, but I don’t want too many styles just for the sake of having them.”
He said the IPA will be hopped generously with Warrior, Cascade and Simcoe hops but will also have a malty undertone, which better represents the origins of the style, as opposed to the over-the-top hop levels seen in the modern version of the brew.
Tom Relihan can be reached at [email protected].
