Holy Resurrection

Holy Resurrection

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 Hullโ€™sโ€”solid, straight-ahead Hullโ€™sโ€”thanks to a revival of the historic local brand by New Haven native Chuck DelVecchio, an accountant-turned-entrepreneur. โ€œTastes 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 Hullโ€™s, available just in lager form for now, is a refreshment thatโ€™s refreshing in a beerscape gone bananas, sometimes literally.

The beerscape was just the opposite in 1977, when the original Hullโ€™s, 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. Connecticutโ€™s were no exception; indeed, Hullโ€™s spent its final 24 years as the stateโ€™s 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.

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Today there are more than 60 in Connecticut alone. One of them, East Havenโ€™s Overshores Brewery, is where DelVecchio decided to contract-brew his new version of Hullโ€™s. The stuff of family lore, he says he grew up hearing how โ€œEaster isnโ€™t the same without Hullโ€™s Bockโ€ and โ€œThe St. Patrickโ€™s Day Parade isnโ€™t the same without Hullโ€™s Export.โ€

Contrary to rumor, DelVecchio says he didnโ€™t 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 lagerโ€”what was then known simply as Hullโ€™s Exportโ€”โ€œwith 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 Hullโ€™s-loverโ€™s seal of approval.

Sitting next to local historian Robert Greenberg, whose collection of thousands of New Haven artifacts has a nice Hullโ€™s contingent, and retired NHPD detective Fred Hurley, who enjoyed plenty of Hullโ€™s back in the day, Tommy Sullivanโ€”now the owner of Tommy Sullivanโ€™s Cafe, a quintessential Irish pub in Branford opened in 1978โ€”disagrees, but not disagreeably. Of the new Hullโ€™s, he says itโ€™s hoppier than the old, not that thatโ€™s a serious problem. โ€œI like it. I think itโ€™ll โ€ฆ In my mind, in my memory, itโ€™ll never be the same . But Iโ€™m very glad theyโ€™re doing it.โ€ He says he intends to serve it in his bar whenever it becomes available on draft.

Sullivan has a special degree of authority, because he actually worked for Hullโ€™s from roughly 1965 to 1974. Starting when he was just 15 years old, heโ€™d be there during summers and other school vacations, โ€œworking on the draft sideโ€ or making deliveries to old joints like Chick Sullivanโ€™s on State Street, where he remembers a sort of Abbott and Costello routine playing out between new customers and barkeeps: โ€œWhat do you have on draft?โ€ โ€œHullโ€™s.โ€ โ€œWhat do you have in bottles?โ€ โ€œHullโ€™s.โ€ โ€œWhat other kinds of beer do you have?โ€ โ€œHullโ€™s.โ€ Then there was โ€œthe triangle,โ€ a set of three Hullโ€™s-heavy bars near Chapel and Park Streets โ€œwhere all the kids used to goโ€: Jocko Sullivanโ€™s, McTriffโ€™s and Old Heidelberg, where a good-sized mug of Hullโ€™s ran about $0.30.

Back on the brewery floor, which was located in a large factory at 800-820 Congress Avenue, โ€œEverybody was a character,โ€ Sullivan says. He describes a staff full of โ€œold-countryโ€ Irishmen and a fraternal camaraderie. There was a private tap room where Hullโ€™s 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 Hullโ€™s closed in โ€™77, two friends and colleagues, Richie Cahill and longtime Hullโ€™s brewmaster James Reynolds, helped Sullivan salvage the tap roomโ€™s keg cooler, which would spend the next โ€œ25 or 30 yearsโ€ in Sullivanโ€™s pub. An artifact that remains unaccounted-for is a large statue of Gambrinusโ€”the mythical patron saint of beer, head crowned and feet bare, holding aloft an overflowing chaliceโ€”that 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 heโ€™s eager to find it and hopes a Daily Nutmeg reader can supply a lead.

Less of a mystery is where to buy the new Hullโ€™s. Retailers include Amity Wine & Spirits, Coastal Wine & Spirits, Panโ€™s Package, Paramount Liquor, Temple Wine & Liquor and both locations of the Wine Thief. For the moment, itโ€™s only available in cans, with six-packs costing a fairly standard $10.99 at retail.

Though itโ€™s meant to approximate the old Hullโ€™s 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 IBUsโ€”International Bitterness Units, which measure the presence of certain bitterness-imparting compoundsโ€”while IPAs weigh in around โ€œ50, 60, 70.โ€ But new Hullโ€™s has about 32โ€”โ€œso it actually has a great full-bodied beer flavor, but it doesnโ€™t linger in your mouth like an IPA does, so itโ€™s great with food.โ€

My own foodless taste-testing suggests itโ€™s worth trying new Hullโ€™s a few different ways. Straight from the can, itโ€™s reasonably hoppy, with a subtle malty finish. Poured into a regular pint glass, itโ€™s a little less hoppy, a little more malty. Poured into a pilsner fluteโ€”which is how a couple of old promo materials in Greenbergโ€™s stash depict itโ€”itโ€™s smoother and sweeter still.

You might find you prefer it one way or another, or you might find, as I have, that itโ€™s pretty darn likable any which way.

Hullโ€™s 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 Sullivanโ€™s Cafe. Image 5 depicts six-packs of old Hullโ€™s and new.

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