10 Years of Friday Froth: CTbites Beer Editor James Gribbon Reflects on the CT Beer Scene

In early December of 2010, a friend invited me to the soft opening of a restaurant and would have been exactly on time, if she had planned to be 90 minutes late. I stood, alone on the fringes the entire time, with no real reason to be there, pathetically grateful every time the staff brought a passed hors d'oeuvre or drink my way, when a woman took pity on me and introduced me to her group. The standard "what do you do" included the writing I'd been doing on motorsports, and one of the group turned out to be our own Stephanie Webster.

"Write up a review for me," she said. "If I like it, maybe we'll post it."

Ten years ago, it became my first post for CTBites in an ongoing column titled Friday Froth. Back then, the state had about 6 breweries. By 2020, I was this site's Beer/Editor-At-Large, and the 2020 Connecticut brewery count had reached 100. We were, for a time, in the world or craft beer we'd hoped to see.

One night in November of 2019, back when it was a normal thing to do, I stopped into a local bar, had just one beer, and got very upset. It wasn't because of the service, it wasn't the atmosphere or another customer, and it wasn't because the beer was bad - it was because the beer was Wrong. Some fellow CTbeer tweeps and I had a discussion about it online, and we ended up guessing my pint had probably just been poured from the bottom of the keg, which left the beer turbid, altered the flavor and aroma, and made a long time favorite of mine unrecognizable. "Well, that was kind of dumb," I thought at the time, and sang a little Warren Zevon in my head. "Excitable boy, they all said..."

When Christian Bale was talking to motorsports reporters at the Indy 500 about playing legendary racer Ken Miles in Ford vs. Ferrari, he said "The only way to honor who they were and what they accomplished is to take the time to get the little things right. We owe them that attention to detail, don't we? You miss, and the people will let you know you missed it. Not because they are harsh people, but because they have a real passion for motor racing and the people in it. They care that much about it."

Well, we do. I figure two entire generations of new drinkers have now grown up and probably fallen over in a world where they never needed to drink Macro Lite at a party because the keg contained the only beer in the house. This is what older beer dorks - those of us whose Soviet-grocery-level options forced us to funnel entire six packs of Keystone at the beach in Panama City and get the worst sunburn of our lives and definitely did not get a second look except in horror from any girls during spring break of 1999 - always wanted.

People day trip all over Connecticut - people travel from out of the state(!) - to drink our beer. We can take entire beer vacations now. I've taken northerly beer-excursions to Maine, where you can hit four breweries, including freaking Allagash, in a 200 yard walk; the west, where I had fledgling craft beers under the golden trumpet of Moroni in Salt Lake City; the deep south, where Creature Comforts is busy winning awards in a space that was a tire shop when I haunted Athens, GA; and the Extremely Deep South in Costa Rica where it doesn't really count as "drinking" a case of Imperial a day considering most of the beer travels directly from the can to the evaporation layer an inch above your skin.

We owe broad respect to the locals who have made it work here, and to a lot of those breweries whose thread was clipped by the Fates, because coming home to Connecticut beer absolutely rules. Draw a line from anywhere to anywhere across our map, and it will touch a world-class brewery. Hollow, hopeless old factories have transformed from urban blight to vibrant life, like some Hollywood editor wiped a scene from black and white to color. The state is saving and reclaiming farmland for malt, hops, and orchards - we have farm breweries for possibly the first time since farmers could only get beer by making it themselves

Beer gardens and tap rooms have become gravitational wells of social interaction; locations people had formerly avoided mention of being from are now worth traveling to. The craft beer world has created new attachments between pleasing experiences and places, allowed us to be more open about the possibility for good happening in some formerly indistinct "There."

People made this happen, dreamers and drinkers alike. Someone came up with the idea for the restaurant with the great tap list where you discovered you liked IPA, the tang of gose, or the velvety depth of an excellent stout. You can make a server's day because the chef here is a fire-branded genius, and that meal deserves reaching down a little deeper for the tip.

There are so many ways to create and fold a protein molecule, scientists using supercomputers will never discover all the ways nature has already found a way to make them. Brewers are like that - each a beer dork in their own way. Meeting the CTbeer crowd - from brewers to bartenders, salespeople, festival organizers and overstimulated attendees whose primary mission in life has become getting complete strangers to try the beer they just found out exists two minutes ago because some ecstatic urge is driving them to share the experience with fellow humans... this has been one of the principal joys of my most recent decade.

Crowds aren't even a requirement, especially now. You can get takeout beer without leaving your car. Want to just bliss out on a deck chair solo in the sunlight with something hoppy and strong? They've got a spot for you, too.

In the past few years, I've been asked to judge beer competitions, invited to appear on radio and television if indeed the radio or television show in question was hosted by an existing friend, and have been made a very friendly and reasonable offer to author a book published on the history of beer in Connecticut. This last opportunity seemed a bit daunting at first, but I realized it for the amazing chance it was, and responded to the publisher who, for reasons none of us may ever comprehend, just as I was on the cusp of signing the contract, had completely changed her tone and become unreasonably pedantic about the deadline being "three fucking months ago," and "you've got to be kidding me." I didn't catch much of the rest of what she said despite her helpfully speaking it to me at top volume, but gathered Will Siss had the job by then, and undoubtedly did a better job with the book than I could have, since he's both an irritatingly good author, and bothered to actually write it.

Not everything about this gig is a cheerful early afternoon buzz and having a wonderful time with a young lady you have just met until someone who works at THC tells you to come the hell down out of that tree, no - sometimes it can even be embarrassing.

People accuse us of playing favorites all the time: in the comments on this site, on social media, and at least once in person while clearly several drinks ahead of me and in such a heated manor his wife felt the need to restrain him, thus creating a further difference in opinion vis a vis her top's need to restrain her. That kind of negative feedback is an unfortunate condition of the modern discourse, and it was a sorry spectacle, apart from her breasts, which were lovely.

That instance was over a restaurant review (I didn't even write), but all of these experiences, the time you've given to read this self-indulgence, all of it, is thanks to an industry of people who care, and who deserve our care in return. It's an ethos Steph has curated on this site, and another reason I'm thankful for her being the one who gave me a shot.

Here's to the next ten years.

See you out there.