THE BEER ISSUE: DORCHESTER BREWING ON COLLABORATIONS

“We call it partner brewing because we think about it very differently.”

“We make beer for other breweries, that’s our core business.”

I had wanted to speak with Dorchester Brewing Co. Co-Founder and CEO Matt Malloy about some of the gems they have polished for various other beer makers, but I didn’t know that he would voluntarily jump on the topic. After all, the Boston brewery and destination have a lot of remarkable things popping on their own imprint, from expanded distribution, to a gorgeous new taproom with a food service partner, to wines and seltzers which also bear the Dot Brewing label [plus some of the sweetest merch around].

We got to chatting about all of that over Frozen Kettle Sour beer slushies that you can only get on site, but first, Malloy explained the process behind those ace collaborations …

On their track record …

We make beer for about 12 to 14 breweries at a time, including some pretty major ones. In the past we’ve made beer for Evil Twin, Stillwater, Radiant Pig. We’ve made thousands of barrels of Save the Robots [East Coast IPA for Radiant Pig in NY]. … We make beer for Lone Pine, out of Maine …

On their collaborative philosophy …

We don’t call it contract brewing, we call it partner brewing because we think about it very differently. We’ve very pro our partner and we know that we are the last ones to touch that beer before it goes on the shelf.

On teaming up …

People reach out and say they’re expanding or growing, or it’s a new brewery and they want 60 barrels of beer and they can’t make that. That’s what we do. We make manufacturing margins on this stuff, so we make the least of everybody in the process, but that doesn’t matter to us.

Fundamentally, we look at [the company] like a three-legged stool—a beautiful 14,000-square-foot taproom with a BBQ restaurant where we partner with an amazing minority-owned business M&M BBQ, we have distribution with Craft Collective, and we also have some small things going on.

On the process …

A typical brewer might come to us and say, Hey, I have these beers and I want to make them. And we can make them exactly as they want, or we can sit down as we typically do and say, Hey, based upon what we have done in the past, have you looked at this or have you thought about this? So it can be done exactly how you want it, or it can be more of a collaboration. We’re doing a lot of invention here. Our seltzer took about nine months of bench testing to get to something that has body and flavor.

On the big picture …

Most breweries start and they want to go into distribution as fast as possible. We didn’t want to do it for years. We just celebrated our five-year anniversary, and we only started using distribution during COVID when a lot of the people we make beer for just stopped brewing. You look at an empty brewery where you only have 10 to 15% of the business you typically do, and what do you do? You start looking at other opportunities. We can work our beers into times when we’re not making beer for other people.

On the market and where it’s heading …

New England IPAs are hot, we make a lot of them here, they’re complex to do them well. …

We have an amazing staff that’s been here for years, and for our partners they bring that experience to the table. Data doesn’t lie, so we can go and look at all of our records and run reports to see what’s working out. And that’s the beautiful thing, when you’re working with us we bring in a collective experience of having seen hundreds of recipes, and that’s a unique position to be in.

I’ve always been a big fan of seltzers in that they provide something that a lot of people are looking for. … If you like it, it’s OK. …

We’re creating things that have more body and more complexity, and I think the market is appreciating that. At the same time, with COVID, everyone is skewing toward lower ABV products. I think people are saying, Hey, there’s an opportunity to come out of this while still having a good time, but maybe not drinking the 12-percenters that you started off with.