NIGHT SHIFT BREWING: “MAKING THE DAY PAY OFF”

“He’s not threatening, not menacing, but he’s powerful,” says Michael Oxton. He’s talking about the “hop owl,” a visual double-entendre that’s part of Night Shift Brewing’s logo, and which Oxton also happened to design himself. “He still needs a name though,” he adds.

Oxton is one of the four twentysomething guys behind Night Shift, a group of college friends who live and brew together in Somerville’s Ball Square.

What started as a homebrew operation is … well, still a homebrew operation. But not for long. The group is close to securing their brewers’ license, which will let them sell their beer—expect to see that hop owl on shelves by August.

“Hopefully, down the line, we’ll own our own 30-barrel brewery,” says Mike O’Mara, the business-operations arm of the soon-to-be LLC. Usually, this kind of line sounds like the pipedream of your unemployed roommate. Coming from O’Mara—who, during this interview, keeps popping into the kitchen to check on the yeast he’s prepping—it sounds modest.

Their plan is to split the process between contract brewing (paying a larger brewery to produce and manufacture a Night Shift recipe) their more straightforward beers, and nanobrewing their more complex creations, so they can have control over aging them, controlling the gravity and tweaking the flavors.

Inspired by breweries like Dogfish Head and Cambridge’s own Pretty Things, Night Shift is motivated by the idea of innovation in beer, dreaming up conceptual recipes that use local ingredients, like Somerville’s Taza Chocolate, and cranberries and honey from Massachusetts farms.

“We want to make beers that catch people off guard,” as Oxton, who also works as a production assistant on film projects, puts it. Take Trifecta: A Belgian Pale Ale, it uses three kinds of everything—three “A” malts (malts that start with the letter A), three “S” hops and three Trappist yeast strains, explains Robert Burns, Night Shift’s unofficial brewmaster. The flavor strikes in three phases, too—a crisp, refreshing hop bite at first, then comes the malt sweetness, and finally, a fruity, yeasty aftertaste. It’s a beer you wistfully remember the next time you’re scanning your own fridge for a cold one.

Night Shift’s incipient days were at Bowdoin College in Maine, where they took their interest in craft beer to another level, hosting dorm-room tastings of their favorite beers and blogging their reviews. Soon, the samples being passed around at the group’s regular tasting parties were of their own homebrewed concoctions. It’s hard to imagine how they continue to squeeze guests into their two-family house these days, between the 100-odd gallons they’ve got fermenting, but they do.

“We brew during the week until 2am, go to bed, get four hours of sleep, then go to our day jobs,” says Burns, who’s a computer engineer by day. “Standing on your feet for seven hours is definitely a labor of love. We wouldn’t do it if we weren’t passionate about it.”

“How about Hoppy?” jokes Justin Strasburger, who’d just joined the “what to name the owl” conversation. The guys groan. O’Mara ducks out to check on his yeast. I finish my snifter of Trifecta, and hope for another.

SAMPLE NIGHT SHIFT’S BEERS FOR YOURSELF AT A PRIVATE TASTING THIS THURSDAY, 1.20.11, AT DIG HQ. FOR ACCESS, DROP AN EMAIL TO HONESTPINT@DIGPUBLISHING.COM.

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