In New Haven, you can find endless lagers, ales, stouts, porters, sours, ciders. You can find ABVs in the double-digits. You can find house brews not served anywhere else. You can find beers aged in used wine and bourbon barrels. You can find flavors of black cherry or melon, coffee or caramel, even grass or smoke.
And now you can find Hullโsโsolid, straight-ahead Hullโsโthanks to a revival of the historic local brand by New Haven native Chuck DelVecchio, an accountant-turned-entrepreneur. โTastes like beer,โ my companion said between swigs last weekend at Three Sheets (where it launched on Friday), and she was so right. With balanced hops and malt and without any bell-and-whistle flavors, the new Hullโs, available just in lager form for now, is a refreshment thatโs refreshing in a beerscape gone bananas, sometimes literally.
The beerscape was just the opposite in 1977, when the original Hullโs, founded in New Haven in 1872, went out of business. In the decades after Prohibition, which had killed many breweries in its own right, homogenizing national brands like Anheuser-Busch used expensive mass-market campaigns and, by some accounts, shady on-the-ground tactics to muscle out regional and local breweries. Connecticutโs were no exception; indeed, Hullโs spent its final 24 years as the stateโs sole brewer. In an advertorial supplement to the New Haven Register on November 5, 1972, the business marked both its centennial and its rarity: an industry that had once numbered more than 2,000 breweries nationally, the company noted, had shrunk to less than 100.
sponsored by
Today there are more than 60 in Connecticut alone. One of them, East Havenโs Overshores Brewery, is where DelVecchio decided to contract-brew his new version of Hullโs. The stuff of family lore, he says he grew up hearing how โEaster isnโt the same without Hullโs Bockโ and โThe St. Patrickโs Day Parade isnโt the same without Hullโs Export.โ
Contrary to rumor, DelVecchio says he didnโt purchase either the trademark or the original lager recipe. Instead, he snapped up the trademark after it fell into the public domain and hired a beer historian to help reconstruct the lagerโwhat was then known simply as Hullโs Exportโโwith the appropriate grain build, hops, malt.โ At 36, DelVecchio is too young to have ever tasted the original article, but he says his family has given the new version the Hullโs-loverโs seal of approval.
Sitting next to local historian Robert Greenberg, whose collection of thousands of New Haven artifacts has a nice Hullโs contingent, and retired NHPD detective Fred Hurley, who enjoyed plenty of Hullโs back in the day, Tommy Sullivanโnow the owner of Tommy Sullivanโs Cafe, a quintessential Irish pub in Branford opened in 1978โdisagrees, but not disagreeably. Of the new Hullโs, he says itโs hoppier than the old, not that thatโs a serious problem. โI like it. I think itโll
Sullivan has a special degree of authority, because he actually worked for Hullโs from roughly 1965 to 1974. Starting when he was just 15 years old, heโd be there during summers and other school vacations, โworking on the draft sideโ or making deliveries to old joints like Chick Sullivanโs on State Street, where he remembers a sort of Abbott and Costello routine playing out between new customers and barkeeps: โWhat do you have on draft?โ โHullโs.โ โWhat do you have in bottles?โ โHullโs.โ โWhat other kinds of beer do you have?โ โHullโs.โ Then there was โthe triangle,โ a set of three Hullโs-heavy bars near Chapel and Park Streets โwhere all the kids used to goโ: Jocko Sullivanโs, McTriffโs and Old Heidelberg, where a good-sized mug of Hullโs ran about $0.30.
Back on the brewery floor, which was located in a large factory at 800-820 Congress Avenue, โEverybody was a character,โ Sullivan says. He describes a staff full of โold-countryโ Irishmen and a fraternal camaraderie. There was a private tap room where Hullโs employees would drink together and invite honored guests like cops, firemen and postal workers to join them. The old-timers might break out into song, singing Irish folk tunes Sullivan says transported the room back to the Emerald Isle.
When Hullโs closed in โ77, two friends and colleagues, Richie Cahill and longtime Hullโs brewmaster James Reynolds, helped Sullivan salvage the tap roomโs keg cooler, which would spend the next โ25 or 30 yearsโ in Sullivanโs pub. An artifact that remains unaccounted-for is a large statue of Gambrinusโthe mythical patron saint of beer, head crowned and feet bare, holding aloft an overflowing chaliceโthat famously graced the top of the Congress Avenue factory. Sullivan remembers it being removed with a crane and loaded onto a flatbed, destination unknown. Greenberg says heโs eager to find it and hopes a Daily Nutmeg reader can supply a lead.
Less of a mystery is where to buy the new Hullโs. Retailers include Amity Wine & Spirits, Coastal Wine & Spirits, Panโs Package, Paramount Liquor, Temple Wine & Liquor and both locations of the Wine Thief. For the moment, itโs only available in cans, with six-packs costing a fairly standard $10.99 at retail.
Though itโs meant to approximate the old Hullโs Export, DelVecchio says the new one offers something special in the marketplace today. Using chemistry to make his case, he says national-brand lagers typically contain somewhere between seven and 12 IBUsโInternational Bitterness Units, which measure the presence of certain bitterness-imparting compoundsโwhile IPAs weigh in around โ50, 60, 70.โ But new Hullโs has about 32โโso it actually has a great full-bodied beer flavor, but it doesnโt linger in your mouth like an IPA does, so itโs great with food.โ
My own foodless taste-testing suggests itโs worth trying new Hullโs a few different ways. Straight from the can, itโs reasonably hoppy, with a subtle malty finish. Poured into a regular pint glass, itโs a little less hoppy, a little more malty. Poured into a pilsner fluteโwhich is how a couple of old promo materials in Greenbergโs stash depict itโitโs smoother and sweeter still.
You might find you prefer it one way or another, or you might find, as I have, that itโs pretty darn likable any which way.
Hullโs Brewing Company
Contract-brewed by Overshores Brewing Company โ 250 Bradley St, East Haven
hullsbeer@gmail.com
www.hullsbrewingcompany.com
Written by Dan Mims. Images 1, 2 and 5 photographed by Dan Mims. Images 3 and 4, depicting items in the Robert S. Greenberg Made in New Haven Collection, photographed by Robert Greenberg. Image 2 depicts Tommy and Maeve Sullivan inside Tommy Sullivanโs Cafe. Image 5 depicts six-packs of old Hullโs and new.