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 Hullβsβsolid, straight-ahead Hullβsβthanks to a revival of the historic local brand by New Haven native Chuck DelVecchio, an accountant-turned-entrepreneur. βTastes like beer,β 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 Hullβs, available just in lager form for now, is a refreshment thatβs refreshing in a beerscape gone bananas, sometimes literally.
The beerscape was just the opposite in 1977, when the original Hullβs, 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. Connecticutβs were no exception; indeed, Hullβs spent its final 24 years as the stateβs 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 Havenβs Overshores Brewery, is where DelVecchio decided to contract-brew his new version of Hullβs. The stuff of family lore, he says he grew up hearing how βEaster isnβt the same without Hullβs Bockβ and βThe St. Patrickβs Day Parade isnβt the same without Hullβs Export.β
Contrary to rumor, DelVecchio says he didnβt 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 lagerβwhat was then known simply as Hullβs Exportββwith the appropriate grain build, hops, malt.β At 36, DelVecchio is too young to have ever tasted the original article, but he says his family has given the new version the Hullβs-loverβs seal of approval.
Sitting next to local historian Robert Greenberg, whose collection of thousands of New Haven artifacts has a nice Hullβs contingent, and retired NHPD detective Fred Hurley, who enjoyed plenty of Hullβs back in the day, Tommy Sullivanβnow the owner of Tommy Sullivanβs Cafe, a quintessential Irish pub in Branford opened in 1978βdisagrees, but not disagreeably. Of the new Hullβs, he says itβs hoppier than the old, not that thatβs a serious problem. βI like it. I think itβll
Sullivan has a special degree of authority, because he actually worked for Hullβs from roughly 1965 to 1974. Starting when he was just 15 years old, heβd be there during summers and other school vacations, βworking on the draft sideβ or making deliveries to old joints like Chick Sullivanβs on State Street, where he remembers a sort of Abbott and Costello routine playing out between new customers and barkeeps: βWhat do you have on draft?β βHullβs.β βWhat do you have in bottles?β βHullβs.β βWhat other kinds of beer do you have?β βHullβs.β Then there was βthe triangle,β a set of three Hullβs-heavy bars near Chapel and Park Streets βwhere all the kids used to goβ: Jocko Sullivanβs, McTriffβs and Old Heidelberg, where a good-sized mug of Hullβs ran about $0.30.
Back on the brewery floor, which was located in a large factory at 800-820 Congress Avenue, βEverybody was a character,β Sullivan says. He describes a staff full of βold-countryβ Irishmen and a fraternal camaraderie. There was a private tap room where Hullβs 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 Hullβs closed in β77, two friends and colleagues, Richie Cahill and longtime Hullβs brewmaster James Reynolds, helped Sullivan salvage the tap roomβs keg cooler, which would spend the next β25 or 30 yearsβ in Sullivanβs pub. An artifact that remains unaccounted-for is a large statue of Gambrinusβthe mythical patron saint of beer, head crowned and feet bare, holding aloft an overflowing chaliceβthat 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 heβs eager to find it and hopes a Daily Nutmeg reader can supply a lead.
Less of a mystery is where to buy the new Hullβs. Retailers include Amity Wine & Spirits, Coastal Wine & Spirits, Panβs Package, Paramount Liquor, Temple Wine & Liquor and both locations of the Wine Thief. For the moment, itβs only available in cans, with six-packs costing a fairly standard $10.99 at retail.
Though itβs meant to approximate the old Hullβs 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 IBUsβInternational Bitterness Units, which measure the presence of certain bitterness-imparting compoundsβwhile IPAs weigh in around β50, 60, 70.β But new Hullβs has about 32ββso it actually has a great full-bodied beer flavor, but it doesnβt linger in your mouth like an IPA does, so itβs great with food.β
My own foodless taste-testing suggests itβs worth trying new Hullβs a few different ways. Straight from the can, itβs reasonably hoppy, with a subtle malty finish. Poured into a regular pint glass, itβs a little less hoppy, a little more malty. Poured into a pilsner fluteβwhich is how a couple of old promo materials in Greenbergβs stash depict itβitβs smoother and sweeter still.
You might find you prefer it one way or another, or you might find, as I have, that itβs pretty darn likable any which way.
Hullβs Brewing Company
Contract-brewed by Overshores Brewing Company β 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 Sullivanβs Cafe. Image 5 depicts six-packs of old Hullβs and new.