A Brewery with a Cause
At Provincetown Brewing Co., Activism is a Key Ingredient
With its storied history, the name Provincetown evokes images of fishing boats dotting the harbor, antique captains’ houses lining picturesque narrow streets, miles of dunes, wild shoreline, wild parties, artists, galleries and throngs of tourists crowding those quaint streets. Craft beer? Not so much. But Provincetown Brewing Co. (PBC) hopes to change that.
A craft brewery with activism at its core, PBC opened its taproom doors in August 2019, a month after it had begun distributing its beer. Located on a prominent corner one block from MacMillan Wharf, in a building that previously housed a health food store, founder Chris Hartley says the taproom “really had become a community space for a lot of the locals and year-round residents,” when it had to shut down in March 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The business was luckier than many. Though the taproom was quiet, business at the liquor stores selling its cans never let up.
After a roughly three-month shutdown, PBC was allowed to reopen the taproom to guests outdoors in late June. The owners expanded patio seating and added landscaping to make the area more inviting. Just before the July 4th weekend, indoor seating was also allowed. “July and August were very solid months for us,” Hartley says. “We’re very, very fortunate.”
PBC has a small, three-barrel brewhouse, with a seven-barrel fermenter and bright tank at the rear of the taproom. The owners consider this a sort of test kitchen, where they plan to produce “fun, experimental one-offs that we serve exclusively here in the taproom,” says Erik Borg, co-owner and head of sales and marketing. But, “If something really hits, if something’s really exciting to our customers, we might take that and can it and produce it offsite on a larger scale.” (Unfortunately, the brewhouse was also affected by the pandemic. At the time of this writing, it still was not operational but hopes were it would be up and running by November.)
Before starting the business, Hartley was a store designer for Ralph Lauren and Kiehl’s in New York, then worked in residential construction there. The craft beer enthusiast was inspired to launch a brewery by his love of Provincetown, which he had been visiting for a decade. Before moving to Provincetown from New York, Hartley spent six months at Turtle Swamp Brewing, in Jamaica Plain, interning with head brewer Nik Walther. A mutual friend from Brooklyn Brewery introduced the two.
In addition to making great beer, it was important to Hartley to highlight the organizations that make Provincetown what it is and to create a community space for the cross-section of everyone who visits the seaside town. “Being an activism beer brand was always part of the ethos of the brand,” he says. Noting that breweries are communal by nature, he wanted to shine a spotlight on Provincetown’s distinctive community “and the progressive values of this town.”
PBC is committed to donating 15% of its profits to organizations that “reflect what we see the values of Provincetown being,” explains Borg, who coined the term draftivism to define the business’ founding vision. “For us that’s LGBTQ+ inclusion, conservation and the arts, especially local arts.” Borg began helping behind the scenes with marketing and public relations in New York, before the business even launched. He says he took the plunge as Hartley’s business partner and moved to Provincetown in May 2019. But he is not exactly new to town. He was a reporter for the Provincetown Banner from 2012-2014.
THE BEER
PBC is anchored by a small core of staple beers and features a rotating selection of specialty brews. Because Provincetown is, for the most part, a seasonal vacation town, Hartley says he wanted the core offerings to represent “a taste of P-town. I was trying to create something where when you drink that beer you think of being on the beach at Herring Cove or being at The Boatslip for tea.” (The Boatslip is home to Provincetown’s renowned tea dance.) The staples are the Bearded Mistress, a medium bitter IPA; Golden Hook Ale, a mildly sweet golden ale with citrus notes; and Crandaddy Sour, a mildly tart sour beer flavored with cranberry purée.
In 2020 the brewery introduced its limited edition 400th Commemorative Brew in honor of the anniversary of the Pilgrims’ first landing in Provincetown 400 years ago. It is a pale ale sweetened with molasses. To develop the recipe, Hartley and Borg met with a researcher at the Pilgrim Monument Museum, to “learn about what kind of beer they would have, what kind of flavor profiles would be authentic to that era,” Borg explains. In addition to finding out that beer was essential to the Pilgrims, safer in fact than water, they discovered that the beverage our forebears knew as beer “would not have been familiar to us today,” he continues. “They didn’t use hops. They didn’t use a lot of ingredients that we consider to be beer. But they would have had molasses as a sweetening agent. So we chose to make a pale ale lightly sweetened with molasses for that reason.”
Asphalt Glitter, a coffee stout, began life as a taproom special but was so popular the owners decided to can it and distribute it on a larger scale. Named for the phenomenon of Provincetown’s roads being covered in glitter following parades, it is finished with coffee from Three Fins Coffee Roasters in West Dennis. This fall’s seasonal selection, Power to the Pilsner, is clean and crisp, with light pilsner malt that the brewery cheekily notes is for “the real #proudboys and girls!” Hartley and Borg anticipate introducing a winter porter as soon as the brewhouse is operational.
Because of the town’s infrastructure and water restrictions, Provincetown has limited PBC to producing only 500 barrels per year in the brewhouse. That is enough to supply the taproom, but not their extended business. So PBC contracts with Dorchester Brewing Co., in Dorchester, to make the majority of its beer. Hartley continues to work with Turtle Swamp’s Walther, and assistant brewer Tanner Cobb, to develop most of the beer flavors.
Though about 70% of the beer is sold in the taproom, the company is constantly expanding its distribution. Currently PBC beer is available in most liquor stores and restaurants in Provincetown and many locations throughout the Cape and Boston. Borg says they are also looking outside Massachusetts to markets that have a strong connection to Provincetown, like “New York and other places where the name Provincetown elicits a strong reaction.”
DRAFTIVISM
The brewery wears its draftivism on its cans. The 400th Commemorative Brew, for example, features photos and quotes from the town’s most iconic residents. These were assembled in collaboration with The Generations Project, a New York-based storytelling organization that preserves the history of the LGBTQ+ community and is teaming up with the Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum to exhibit a two-part LGBTQ+ historical anthology of Provincetown’s last 100 years.
The Cranberry Sour can devotes space to the Provincetown Conservation Trust, which is “dedicated to preserving the woods, wetlands, dunes and forests of Provincetown, and the great variety of flora and fauna that call them home.” The volunteer organization, founded in 1980, oversees more than 56 acres of conserved natural habitat, and has played a vital role in protecting these lands.
In the summer of 2020 PBC highlighted Summer of SASS and the Transgender Emergency Fund of Massachusetts. “We found the Transgender Emergency Fund of Massachusetts because it was June and June is Pride month,” Borg says. “At the same time the Black Lives Matter movement was really coalescing. We wanted to find an organization that is local and supports the most vulnerable population within the LGBTQ+ community, which is Black or Trans women of color. This organization was doing exactly that, on the ground, immediately giving financial assistance to people in need. We thought it was the perfect organization to support for the time.”
Summer of SASS, he explains, relocates LGBTQ+ 18-20-yearolds from “difficult, challenging situations in other parts of the country and shows them a healthy, welcoming environment to be queer.” The organization helps them find housing and jobs in Provincetown. Usually the young adults stay for a finite amount of time then either return home or go on to school or more permanent jobs. There were no new arrivals in 2020 but seven participants in the 2019 program stayed on.
In its short history PBC has provided financial assistance to even more organizations . Though the brewery is not yet profitable they have begun donating what they can, according to Hartley. As its distribution grows so will the roster of groups it supports, reflecting the values of the community and the town.
TAPROOM
With high ceilings and lots of windows, the PBC taproom has cozy living room seating, a pool table, a few booths along the outer walls and counter seating. Hartley says he and his business partners were lucky to find the centrally-located space, with 3200 square feet indoors and a 1000-square-foot patio. The building had an existing kitchen, and the three-person staff stayed on to prepare “good quality bar food. You can come in and have a good meal at a good price — especially by P-town standards — but very casual, and we want to keep it that way,” he says.
Both the outdoor space and the kitchen have turned out to be even more valuable than the owners could have predicted. Covid-era law in Massachusetts has stipulated that bars can’t serve drinks unless patrons are also eating. And with offerings from breakfast sandwiches and avocado toast in the morning to chicken pot pie, nacho plates, black bean burgers and more all day, food is not an afterthought.
If there is a silver lining to the cloud surrounding so much of this tumultuous time, it may be that lots of summer people are extending their stays, notes Borg. “People who work remotely who have second homes are extending their remote work. It’s shuffling the deck on the year-round commute.” That and active weekends through the fall kept business “really solid.” As temperatures cooled, the PBC owners enhanced the patio space with pumpkins, bales of hay, heat lamps and tabletop propane heaters, in order to keep it available through the end of 2020.
Given winter in New England, a move indoors is inevitable. Provincetown Brewing Co. and its community gathering space will be ready.
Provincetown Brewing Co.
141 Bradford Street, Provincetown
(508) 413-9076
provincetownbrewingco.com
