50 States of Beers, #5: Connecticut

Note: 50 States, 50 Beers. This is my project for 2021: one beer from every state in the Union. That sounds simple, right?

I’ve said it before: it’s not cool being from Connecticut. Every other state has something. Wyoming? Yellowstone. Delaware? Hey, man, it’s TINY, and it’s got all those credit card companies. Arkansas has college football. Even Idaho’s got potatoes and right-wing militias. Nah, Connecticut’s the least-cool state in the Union. It mainly exists as a place for people traveling between New York and Boston to bitch about when driving through it.

I grew up there, and I can’t even blame people for thinking ill of the state. Connecticut doesn’t do itself any favors. The bottom chunk of the state — the Gold Coast — is full of rich assholes who get articles with titles like “How Greenwich Republicans Learned to Love Trump.” Its capital city is just a string of Geno Auriemma billboards and crumbling insurance headquarters. The state food is a steamed cheeseburger, which brings the state endless piles of shit (totally undeserved, IMHO — steamed cheeseburgers are amazing). The most famous athlete from the state over the last few decades ended up being a mass murderer. The Whalers moved to fucking Raleigh, North Carolina.

See? Nothing cool about it. There’s not even anything uncool enough about the state to make it cool. Connecticut is just eight counties and 3.6 million people equaling one noncommital shrug of the shoulders. It is what it is.

A few saving graces for the state. Franklin Giant Grinders in Hartford. Ray Allen beating Allen Iverson in the 1996 Big East Tournament. Rebecca Lobo’s Hall of Fame induction. The 2nd or 3rd-best pizza state in the Union (don’t argue with me, just look). And a rising craft beer scene that — while not on the level of Vermont, Massachusetts, or Maine (not many are) — features some of the more exceptional breweries in New England. In Hartford, New Park makes crazily inventive beers dripping with hops and fruits. South Windsor has the Connecticut Valley Brewing Company, which has great beer and an awesome aviation theme — there’s a Corsair right in their logo! Beer’d, in Stonington, makes big, huge, double and triple IPAs. Hell, even my hometown of Enfield has a brewery — Powder Hollow Brewing Company — that distributes to Massachusetts. That’s a point of pride.

Maybe I’ll do a special hometown edition of Powder Hollow when I actually get to visit my (now-vaccinated) grandparents there. However, this week we’re going to focus on one of the more fabled breweries in Connecticut: OEC, out of Oxford.

OEC is a fascinating brewery — if you’d like to read more about them, I highly suggest this excellent Bloomberg News piece. Let me distill it, however, down to a few different bullet points.

• OEC stands for “Ordinem Ecentrici Coctores,” translating (from the Latin) to “The Order of the Eccentric Boilers.”
• They focus on “bridging Old World brewing practices and antique recipe research with a New World sensibility of experimentation.”
• That means they make some wild, wild shit. Their website, in fact, splits their offerings into “Usual Suspects,” “Less Usual Suspects,” and “Even Less Usual Suspects.” There are a lot of sours on the menu, along with stuff like the BiFrost (a Nordic-inspired “cryogenic” double pale ale), the Amara (a Polish “grodziskie” style beer from the 1400s), or the Jotunheim (a blended ale done with in collaboration with a Norwegian brewery). You have to wonder if Fat Thor didn't hang out here before he left to go play video games in Scandanavia.

It sounds like a very cool place, right? I almost feel bad that I chose a relatively run-of-the-mill beer from theirs to represent OEC (and the state of Connecticut, I guess), but I’m happy with my choice. That’s the Coolship Lager, a Czech lager done in the traditional style and made in OEC’s trademark copper coolship container. It’s unfiltered, open fermented — and all-around tremendous.

After demolishing so many IPAs for this project in the cold of winter, it’s nice to remember just how refreshing a good pilsner is. Man, this one is great. As far as Czech lagers go, I don’t think I’ve ever had a better one — at least not from a domestic beer. It’s as fresh and as tasty of a lager as I’ve ever had, with just the right amount of hops and a wonderfully delightful clean finish to the tongue. It may have been a cold-ass winter night in Somerville when I had it, but it was sure easy to picture myself downing a four-pack of these on some warm summer night in the backyard. Dare to dream.

What a find. If they make a lager this good, I’ll have to investigate some of the other concoctions they make. Good on you, OEC — doing my homeland proud. Nutmeg state forever.

RATING: 94/100.

OTHER RANDOM CONNECTICUT CATEGORIES

Why is the state flag that way?

Wait, let me dig back into my John F. Kennedy Middle School education!

I’m gonna try to do this from memory. Okay — I think the logo means … who travels sustains? Something about the pilgrims coming over from England. And the three grapevines are for the three original colonies that made up the bulk of the early state. I forget which ones they are. I don’t know why they’re grapevines. I don’t think the state has an especially robust wine industry. So, there we go. Let’s see if I’m right.

Checks Wikipedia. Not bad! “He Who Transplanted Sustains.” I was close. And the three grapevines are either for Old Saybrook, New Haven, and the Connecticut colony OR for Wethersfield, Windsor, and Hartford, the oldest towns in the state. They don’t know. Connecticut has been around for a while. I guess I passed the native test!

Tell me about a political scandal or event from Connecticut.

Well, the entire Bush political clan has its roots in Connecticut (and if you want to read some really wild shit, start digging into the life of the FIRST President Bush) — so that’s unfortunate. Ann Coulter is from New Canaan, and Scooter Libby is from New Haven — eek. Joe Lieberman didn’t exactly cover himself in glory after the 2000 election campaign. The relative goodness of Abraham Ribicoff doesn’t exactly cancel all those out.

Let’s talk about someone a lot of you probably haven’t heard about, however: John Rowland. It’d be safe to categorize him as a “rising star” in the Republican Party in the late 1990s when he became the youngest person ever elected Connecticut's governor. In another world, it’s easy to see him following a Charlie Baker-type path to national prominence as the relatively popular Republican governor of a blue state.

Instead, his career imploded in an absolute shitfire of corruption after two terms in office. Let’s paste this quote from the Washington Post in here, from the article covering Rowland’s resignation as impeachment loomed.

But for the past six months, Connecticut has been consumed by revelations about his acceptance of gifts, and his popularity eroded steadily. Rowland allowed major state contractors and gubernatorial aides to foot the bill for a new $14,000 kitchen, a cathedral ceiling and a $3,600 hot tub at his lakeside summer cottage in Litchfield County. These same friends and associates gave him thousands of dollars’ worth of champagne, Cuban cigars and a Mustang convertible.

After he resigned, Rowland went to the slammer for a year — but he wasn’t done in the political corruption world! Oh, hell no. The dude just loved corruption. He went to prison again in 2014, this time for conspiring to hide the payments he received as a consultant for a congressional campaign.

Now, he’s a “regional fundraiser and development director for Prison Fellowship, a charitable organization that ministers to prison inmates.” Thus, it appears that one of the true cautionary tales for 1990s politicians has reached its natural end.

How about a famous sports star from Connecticut?

Let’s ignore the departed Aaron Hernandez and stick to someone much friendlier and less murderier. That man, of course, is Maurice “Mo” Vaughn.

Mo — from Norwalk — was a hulking first baseman for the Red Sox in the 1990s, kind of the “bridge figure” from the Clemens years to the Jimy Williams era. He was a menacing figure at the plate with a tremendous amount of power and was someone that — for all his bulk — moved surprisingly well at first base. He was also an important figure in Red Sox history for other reasons, too — the first black superstar in years on a team (rightfully) dogged with some horrible racial history.

In 1995, when he won the MVP, he was a godlike figure to the Red Sox-loving half of my school’s population and me; the other half tried (and failed) to make their Don Mattingly arguments. He followed that up with more great years of production before his long-simmering feud with the front office — at that time, still populated by the execrable Yawkey family — prompted a free-agent move to Anaheim, where his career fell apart due to injuries. For a certain generation of Sox fans, Mo is as important a player as Nomar Garciaparra or Pedro Martinez — one of the first people who really struck fear into opponents' hearts (especially the Yankees). He’s a guy worth remembering.

NEXT WEEK: Oregon