source: enlightenmentales.wordpress.com
Ben Howe (CAS ’07), an entrepreneurial Core Curriculum alumnus, has opened a nano brewery and appropriately named it Enlightenment Ales!
To our delight, the titles of his individual ales are, in our minds, very much Core-themed: Cosmos, Illumination, Enlightenment.
As Ben describes on the company website, the nano brewery makes Bière de Champagne.
For the laymen in brewery terminology:
- Nanobrewery – a type of very small brewery operation, often culturally defined by a less than 4 US beer barrels brew system.
- Bière de Champagne – one of the newest and most interesting styles of beer. It has much potential within the beer industry as a top-shelf crossover beer. Primarily brewed in Belgium, these beers typically undergo a lengthy maturation. Most are delicate, high in alcohol, highly carbonated and sometimes spiced. Color can range from very pale to dark hues.
Ben (left) at Enlightenment Ales’ first official tasting, 2012 ACBF.
The Edible Boston magazine recently wrote up a profile for Enlightenment Ales, giving it the attention it deserves. Here is an extract:
Upon graduating from Boston University in 2007, Howe’s homebrewing experience earned him a volunteer position at the Northampton Brewery and, several months later, a part-time job at the Cambridge Brewing Company (CBC). He learned fast and continued to homebrew as much as possible, and in 2010 he received a scholarship to study brewing science and engineering at the American Brewers Guild in Vermont.
Roughly three years into his career in beer and newly equipped with a wealth of technical knowledge and money he’d saved while waiting tables, Howe decided to go it alone. A bottle of beer inspired him to start his own company. And as luck would have it, Will Meyers, the brewmaster at CBC who had hired him, offered nothing but encouragement. “Ben is a very talented and creative brewer,” Meyers explains, “hard working, unafraid of putting in the long hours required in honoring the term hand-crafting. I think the light bulb went off after drinking some DeuS, which I may or may not have given him as a Christmas present.”
Those of you over 21: be sure to check out these Core-themed ales!
