WORCESTERMAGAZINE.COM | APRIL 8 - 14, 2021 | 17
ARTIST SPOTLIGHT
Lily O’Brien Lily O’Brien Special to Worcester Magazine | USA TODAY NETWORK
Lily O’Brien is from Charlton. She is an avid oil painter and student at Tantasqua Regional High School. She loves painting, screenwriting and poetry, and hopes to one day have a professional art career. Visit her on Instagram @radical.light.art
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Sam Adams’ fi rst hazy IPA. “That was 16 months of work,” she said, adding, “It started in the nano-brewery where I was working … really nailing everything down. I could do 10 or 12 variations at a time. We fi nally released it locally maybe February or March of 2018.” In 2019, Sam Adams tapped Parisi as head brewer for its new taproom and brewery in downtown Boston, which opened last January. The taproom near Quincy Market was open all of six weeks before Sam Adams decided to close it because of the pandemic. As Parisi prepared to reopen the taproom, she started planning a new series of collaboration beers to drive home the local roots and connections all breweries share, no matter how big or how small.
“With the reopening, we really wanted to weave that into the fabric of our existence here, highlight that we are a local taproom, a local brand, born in Boston, this our neighborhood, these are friends and neighbors,” she said. Her fi rst call was to Wormtown. “I loved the idea of making a beer with Ben again,” she said. Now they just had to settle on the beer they wanted to brew. That part was easy, said Wormtown head brewer Scott Drake. “Her goal of the collab was to bring together the brewers she worked with at Wormtown to craft something we all would enjoy drinking together,” Drake said in an email. “We decided on a 5% Rye Lager.” The brewers used a variety of rye called Danko supplied by Massachusetts maltster Valley Mat in Hadley. Danko, originally from Poland, gives a beer a nice balance of bready, spicey
fl avors throughout. Parisi loves brewing and drinking everything from sours to boozy barrel-aged stouts. But a lager, she said, off ers a true test of a brewer’s skills. “It’s complex, but not complicated,” she said. “There’s complexity to the malt and to all of it, but it’s not complicated. It becomes really evident if you don’t know what you’re doing.” You can taste Your Brewer’s Favorite starting Thursday at the Sam Adams Boston Taproom. Wormtown plans to brew its version on April 13 with the yeast Parisi used. And while it will be the same beer, Wormtown’s edition will not taste the same, she said. “It should be exactly the same beer, but it won’t be — different systems, diff erent water, everything that shows the locality of it,” Parisi said. “Where you make it still maters. It’s still local.”
“Surrealist Landscape #1,” photographed by Kayden Lebouef IMAGES COURTESY OF LILY O’BRIEN
“Guardians,” photographed by Kayden Lebouef
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