It’s a brewery born out of romance, named after a flower, and founded on farmhouse community values. By all accounts Trillium should be the brewery equivalent of that girl in the crochet dress dancing with her eyes closed at a folk festival. Instead, it’s one of the most serious, successful breweries producing widely sought-after beers. Here are 10 things you need to know about it.
Trillium is brewed with love.
Or from love. By love? Trillium Brewing Company was founded by JC and Esther Tetreault. According to them, they were a “young dumb couple in love” who just happened to have coordinating interests in botany and beer.
Your brewskie is named after a flower.
Trillium isn’t the way you say “trillion” tipsy. It’s a flower. And that’s because co-founder JC is a self-described “botany nerd,” and chose to name the brewery after the Trillium flower’s simple beauty. Or, as the founders describe it, “beauty, strength, simplicity, and balance.”
Trillium is greedy for flavor. And that’s awesome.
Trillium has a farmhouse mentality (think wild yeast, barrel aging) with a slight tendency toward mad science. This is why their offerings include casually quenchable stuff like dry-hopped pale ale, but also, and mostly, a ton of flavor-forward beers — a stout made with cold-brew coffee, a “super” saison, even something called “Blackberry Super Soak American Sour Wheat Ale.” Yes, all those words for one beer.
They’re into drinking and yoga and food.
Trillium holds events like “Sweat and Sip,” where an hour-long Vinyasa Flow yoga session is followed up with the ingestible nirvana of a cold beer. It’s also holding a seasonal clothing drive, sometimes lets other breweries take over its taps for a day, and does food-pairing pop-ups. (Food truck Chubby Chickpea is a weekly visitor, meaning you can drink Trillium beer with food like this.)
Trillium is into futuristic hopping.
Over the course of an all-star brewing party called “Beer Camp Across America,” the folks at Trillium stumbled upon something called Lupulin powder — basically the powdered essence of flash-frozen hops. Naturally, they were inspired to brew with it, and came up with a beer called “Pow Pow” that combines a few kinds of powdered hops with non-futuristic regular hops yielding a bright, citrusy 7.7 percent double IPA.
Trillium was one of the “Top 10 Brewers in the World” in 2016.
Every year, user-generated beer-rating site RateBeer.com compiles a list of the 100 best breweries in the world, and in 2016, Trillium made the top 10. According to RateBeer, the list is generated by “ten different weighted scales that place an emphasis on reviews of the past year,” plus “historical all around performance.” Whatever your opinion of beer-rating sites, the people seem to have spoken.
Trillium knows its glassware.
Yes, you can drink beer out of almost anything that’ll hold it (seriously pretty much anything). But, just like wine, certain beers yield a bit more of their character in specific glassware. Among the bountiful swag available at its online store (beanie, onesie, fine art), Trillium offers a variety of beer-specific glasses that’ll make you regret ever using a Solo cup.
It’s currently only available in Massachusetts.
Yeah, here’s the bummer. Unless you’re in the state where milky clam-based soup is called “chowdahhhhhh,” you won’t be able to buy Trillium on the regular. Yet.
Trillium might cost you a trillion bucks. (O.K., that was lame…)
Trillium is among the very very high-priced craft beers out there (a four-pack of its Dry Hopped Fort Pointe Pale Ale will set you back $20.20). To be fair, and according to Trillium, there’s quality behind the cost. But if you are lucky enough to score a four-pack, just … sip slowly.
One of its beers is named after an incredibly bizarre (naked) David Hasselhoff photo.
Trillium’s adorably named “Covered in Puppies” beer is a juicy, fruity double IPA with notes of warm bread and tropical fruit. Oh, and it was inspired by this incredibly terrifying photo of a naked David Hasselhoff actually (thankfully) “covered” in/by puppies. Adding to the bizarro factor, the label was inspired by none other than master visual trickster M.C. Escher.
Recent Trillium Brewing Company Reviews
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