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Still hoppy after all these years: Wormtown’s brewmaster on 11th anniversary, brewstillery and more

MATTHEW TOTA

In less than a month, Wormtown Brewery will have completed 11 years of brewing beer in Worcester. Such anniversaries usually get mentioned as footnotes, not milestones.

But last March Wormtown did not have the chance to celebrate its 10th birthday, first postponed over the concerns for the growing coronavirus outbreak, then canceled altogether.

Wormtown will not schedule a big party this year, for obvious reasons. Nonetheless, this anniversary feels as significant and will receive just as much if not more reverence: It’s a massive year for the brewery.

Wormtown has an impressive, daunting schedule for 2021, including opening a new taproom at 75 Shrewsbury St. and becoming the city’s first distillery.

Last week, I talked to founder and brewmaster Ben Roesch by phone about the busy year ahead. For the last month Roesch has spent a lot of his time in Foxboro, brewing solo at the Patriot Place brewery, while working two days a week in Worcester to help with the taproom buildout and distillery planning. On top of that, he has slowly built up the brewery’s barrel-aging program, barrel by barrel.

Barring any setbacks, Roesch expects to start pouring beer at the expanded taproom just in time for Wormtown’s 11th anniversary, including a recreation of their first anniversary beer, a big hoppy double IPA first brewed in 2011.

Where are you in terms of getting your license to distill spirits?

The brewery’s license has been long established; we’ve always augmented the licensing, but we’ve always had the original license from when we started. Those type of changes are a lot easier than getting the distilling license. We have to resubmit all the same information as a distillery, but there are some nuances between spirits and beer, including bonding, where you don’t have to pay taxes on the product until you withdraw it, and the actual premises for distilling and brewing have to be separated. All that stuff is tedious but important for the licensing. First you go to the TTB (Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau), on the federal side, then once you get your federal permit you still have to get your state permit. Just like the brewing side, you have to get the city’s check mark in order to operate it as a taproom. We are in phase one of the three. The goal is to have all stages of licensure complete by the summer.

Ben Roesch is brewer at Wormtown Brewery in Worcester.

RICK CINCLAIR

wood — but everything you distill will be white, clear liquor when it comes out. The easiest thing would be to make some clear spirits that go well in cocktails: vodka, gin, white rum. That will be in conjunction with stuff we make that’s destined for wood. The aging process takes so long. As we’re getting the licensing, we’re trying to reach out to other local distilleries to try to see where there might be some symbiosis. As a distiller we can buy spirits from other distilleries, if they have extra or if we send them some of our wash ahead of time. They can sell it to us so we can finish it up. That way, they have something they can age for a period of time, where we can then buy it and put a Wormtown spin on it. and whiskeys, will come from other distilleries until you can gets something in a barrel long enough to age it.

And authenticity and transparency are important to us. In no way would we try to dupe the consumer, saying we aged this for four or five years. Instead, we want to tell the story of how that liquid came to be in our possession. Most of the brown spirts are known to be coming from that Kentucky bourbon trail. But you can do some well-done brown-aged spirits by using smaller barrels. We will look to get various size barrels – 5-, 10-, 30-, and 50-gallon – and start making some whiskeys. We’re brewers, so grains are what we do; we use a lot of barley and wheat and rye, and those are the types of bases we’re going to be using for these spirits.

In the meantime, you’re using some of those barrels for beer. Just how long has Wormtown had a barrel-aging program?

It had to be within our first year. We’ve had some sort of barrel full of beer consistently throughout our history. Space, until recently, has always been an issue for us. Park Avenue was very small, but we always had three to five barrels going. We were able to do some wild ales and keep them separate from our other beer. Usually it would be a draft-only release, or we would send it to a special festival.

What do you have in your barrels now?

We did a barley wine, which will probably be aging for a while, and a real big imperial stout, the biggest beer we ever brewed. We have such a creative team. Once every four or five weeks, we make a beer at Patriot Place that will go into a barrel. We have a laundry list of beer we want to put in wood, like really big Belgian beers. We’re starting out with the old school and the traditional, then we’re going to start getting funky and weird.

So tell me about this year’s birthday brew.

Every year we do a unique beer for our birthday, every year it’s bigger. Last year we did “Decade Dance,” a really big pantry stout. Coming into this year, though, we knew we weren’t going to have a birthday party, and the taprooms aren’t operating normally. Knowing that everything would be smaller and closer to home, we’re going to recreate birthday brew number one, a double IPA that we brewed in 2011. It’s an 11-year retrospective, looking back at a unique period of time when there still weren’t a ton of new breweries around; New England IPAs were not a thing. Most IPAs were based around that West Coast style like “Be Hoppy” and “Hopulence.” This beer will be more in that vein.