Jack's Abby: Making Clear Lagers in Hazy IPA-land
Unlike Chicago, which proudly celebrates “Chicagoland,” Boston’s geography isn’t as obvious to the visitor. The city proper is small and compact, but the metro area, or Greater Boston, includes around a hundred small towns clustered in the fan stretching out from Boston Harbor. Two radial freeways, I-95 and I-495, mark important distance metrics. Anything inside I-95 is pretty Boston-y, while anything within the larger I-495 ring is Greater Boston. Framingham, home to Jack’s Abby, is 20 miles due west of downtown Boston and about halfway between 95 and 495.
The three Hendler brothers, Jack (Brewmaster), Sam (CEO), and Eric (Finance Director) founded Jack’s Abby in 2011—which was an interesting time to open a lager brewery in Boston. One might argue the early appearance of Sam Adams’ Boston Lager primed the city for lagers, but that’s not really true. At least at the craft level, ales have always been king there. And after Jack’s Abby was just a few tender years old, of course, hazy IPAs completely changed the New England landscape. The first time I had a Jack’s Abby beer was at my brother-in-law’s house, sometime in the mid-teens. It seemed like such an unlikely, almost perverse idea—right there at ground zero of the biggest craze in the 21st century, where people were spending hours in lines to buy thick, very sweet, intense ales, here was a brewery making elegant, clear, crisp lagers.
Turns out they were onto something. A dozen years after launch, the brewery now makes forty-odd thousands barrels of Jack’s Abby beer, and also does enough of a business contract brewing that they are going to install a second brewhouse. Framingham has a long industrial history, and as you cross the railroad tracks on the approach to the brewery, you feel it. Jack’s Abby has taken up residence in a 1950s Dennison Manufacturing building amid a neighborhood of old factories and warehouses. Many of the buildings may now be idle—the one the brewery uses sat for a decade before they moved in—but it feels like a midcentury industrial hub.
Breweries come in all sizes, but experientially we can distinguish them as small or large—the latter characterized by vast open spaces, large vessels of gleaming steel, and impressive automation. (Little breweries fit in the corner next to a taproom.) Jack’s Abby is a large brewery, and you know it the second you pull up. When I arrived with a group of in-laws for our tour, we wandered in the wrong direction and ended up nearly circumambulating the building. It took a while! With such a big building, the brewery could afford a big restaurant, and theirs evokes a Bavarian beer hall. It does not quite prepare you for what you find behind the bar, however. The building is two stories tall, with packaging above. Below is a roomy space that contains their 60-barrel Italian-made brewhouse and rows of fermenters and tanks. There’s even room for can storage. In all, the building has 67,000 square feet of space.
Big steel
Canning line (2nd floor)
Spiral escalator delivering packaged beer.
Can storage!
Brewing and Beer
Jack has a degree from Siebel and started brewing at a brewpub in Boston before starting Jack’s Abby with his brothers. Although the brothers didn’t have definite plans to confine them selves solely to lagers, early beers, all lagers, set the standard, and they never looked back. This is another unlikely element. Lagers are slow to make and require space, tanks, and energy—it’s why so many start-up breweries make ales. Yet even as it has grown, Jack’s Abby sticks to their slow, expensive process, including decoction mashing and proper lagering. Along the way, Jack has become something of an evangelist for good lager beer, and next spring will release a book he co-authored for Brewers Publications called Modern Lager Beer. If you want to hear more of Jack talking about lager, he was on the lager panel of our Fireside Chat this spring.
In the years since I had that introduction to House Lager at my brother-in-law’s, I’ve picked up the odd can or pint where I could. I was keen to do a tour because in those tastings, I’d noticed a distinctive approach to the beer, whether it’s a low-alcohol pale lager or beefy Baltic porter. Before our visit, I had never come across Red Tape, their dunkles and the first beer they ever brewed, but it’s a very good example of the Jack’s Abby approach. The humble dunkel lager can be a sweet, flabby affair, even in Bavaria. Red Tape, by contrast, is surprisingly pale for a dunkles, with a dry, biscotti-like malt profile, crisp and dry. Copper Legend (fun fact: named after their plumber) is another good example of a dry, very drinkable malty lager. That lean, dry quality runs throughout the line, as if Jack works to strip everything out of a beer that isn’t completely necessary.
That isn’t to say that the beers are over-dry or hollow. The decoction mashing both helps that attenuation but also adds back flavor. In a blog post, Jack described what he shoots for: “From our experience, we have found no substitute for the malt intensity, increased attenuation, and perceived fullness of our decoction mash beers. Decoction effectively produces a beer that tastes ‘full’ but is inherently more drinkable than a beer brewed using caramel or melanoidin malts.”
Open fermenter (foreground)
Horizontal tanks
Coolship
They do a bit of barrel-aging as well.
On our tour, we started out at the little pilot brewery, where they start beers out—and also where they can begin using old-school techniques. In addition to decoction, they can do open fermentation and lager the beer in horizontal tanks. They even have a coolship for cooling wort—although that has been a hit-and-miss adventure. This gives them versatility to experiment with very traditional processes, find the flavor profile they want, and then scale up—though many of their most interesting lagers remain draft-only beer.
Their main line of beer is composed of more modern styles, including their hoppy, no-we-don’t-have-an-IPA-but-we-have-this, Hoponius Union a “West Coast hoppy lager.” Fans of funkier, Franconian-style lagers have plenty of options, though. My in-laws arrived at the tour already big fans of Smoke and Dagger, which I’d describe as a Kulmbach schwarzbier with a hint of Bamberg rauch. They have a whole line of kellerbiers as well, Czech styles, and cool experimental lagers like an oated helles we tried.
I have to mention Banner City as well—their collaboration with the Boston Celtics. It replaced Pride and Parquet, the first beer Jack’s Abby did for the team (that beer was apparently too heavy on the “craft” part of the craft lager equation.) Banner City is a classic light lager with hints of delicate spicy hopping and a grainy malt base, but mainly it’s aimed at a broader audience. It’s a testament to their success and stature that the Celtics would choose to partner with them. It also points to the surprising success of the brewery. While Jack is a stickler for tradition—this fall Weihenstephan collaborated with Jack’s Abby for only the second time in their history—the brewery isn’t aimed at niche tastes.
My sense is that New England isn’t going to abandon their IPAs any time soon. I don’t even think that the region will adopt lagers to the extent the Midwest, Texas, and the Pacific Northwest have. Jack’s Abby has put lagers on supermarket shelves and in front of regular drinkers, however. It may be small, but New England has a real and prospering lager scene. The success of Jack’s Abby is a big reason why.
Many thanks to Jack for taking a day during Thanskgiving week to show the family and me around the brewery. If you visit Boston, definitely make a trip to Framingham. The brewery is a real pleasure (public tours happen on Sundays), and the beer hall is a great place to try some of their specialty stuff. Just don’t ask for the hazy IPA.
