WOODSTOCK, CONNECTICUT
A unique family-owned homestead featuring a full-scale brewery and winery, TAYLOR BROOKE BREWERY & WINERY occupies two separate farmhouses up a hill in the historic town of Woodstock.
Inside a maroon aluminum barn with towering brew tanks behind a wood top serving station, Taylor Brooke’s cement-floored main pub space placed community tables underneath glass-cylindered Edison lights and exposed pipes hanging from the high ceiling. A mezzanine area stations the original pilot system.
During March ’22 sojourn, my wife and I discovered nine TB brews and brought a few for the road (reviewed in Beer Index).
Locally grown flaked corn gave light lager, Height Of Luxury, its buttered popcorn pep as spritzy lemon fizz crackled beyond its wispily mossy vegetal souring.
Cocoa-dried Czech dark lager, Throes Of Winter, plied sedate honeyed nuttiness to woody Saaz hop astringency.
Vanilla creamed banana and clove sweetness draped bitter orange peel, grains of paradise tartness and white-peppered lemongrass herbage for Bulrush, a fulsome witbier with a sturdy sugared wheat base.
Easygoing Strawberry Milkshake IPA spread milk-sugared lactose all over mildly tart pureed strawberry, tangy ruby red grapefruit and tertiarily sour passionfruit-guava-kiwi tropicalia.
Mixed fermentation farmhouse ale, Woodstock Veraison, pushed brettanomyces acidity and sour wine yeast into apple-juiced petit Sirah, Frontenac and cayuga must plus dry plum whim. A mouth puckering sour saison.
Fermented on proprietary Corot Noir wine and lightened further by spelt-flaked pilsner malts, Harvest Berliner Weiss gained mild lemon souring, vinous red-green grape esters and briny pinot snips.
Another Harvest Berliner Weiss, influenced by Wild Fox Concord-like grapes and sumac, stayed sharply acidic as salty lemon tartness coalesced with tannic grape-plum dryness above earthen leathering.
Smooth dark-roast chocolate malting led lactic nitro milk stout, Stoggy Hollow, picking up molasses-sapped cinnamon bark resin and latent hazelnut, cola and macadamia illusions.
Creamy vanilla sweetness amplified Bigelow Hollow, letting black coffee-dried cocoa and black malt bittering reach the vanilla frontage above oats-flaked caramel malts and distant walnut-shelled pistachio and macadamia snips.