The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Narragansett pours its new Fresh Catch
A beer to pair with seafood, says Rhode Island brewer
A Rhode Island brewer well known to Baby Boomers in Connecticut held a preview gathering the other night at Shell & Bones Oyster Bar and Grill in New Haven, where chef Arturo Franco-Camacho created a tasty series of seafood samplings.
No surprise there; the location and food are topnotch.
But this was a chance to celebrate an old-school brew’s nod to the competitive beer market’s boutique-brew craze that fills brewers’ tasting rooms most nights. The old name is Narragansett; the newish offering is Fresh Catch, brewed specifically to pair with New England seafood.
Before we get to that, consider the brand’s tumultuous recent history since the 1980s — not long after Narragansett was in the category of Schaefer, Ballantine, Pabst and Piel’s — “a good drinkin’ beer!” as Jimmy Breslin would say.
“The (Narragansett) brand was sold in the middle ’70s,” says Narragansett marketing official BJ Mansuetti, “and due to some legal issues, it didn’t go through until the ’80s, to a company called Falstaff. And they were out in Indiana, and they ended up moving production out there, they changed the recipe; and we employed almost 1,000 Rhode Islanders at the time. And laying off those people just left a bitter taste in local folks’ mouths.”
Consider that in the previous 20 or 25 years, seven out of 10 beers
consumed in New England were Narragansett beers, Mansuetti says. Based in Cranston, Rhode Island, “We were bigger than Budweiser ever was,” he says.
Then came the rebirth of the brand.
“The first thing we wanted to do when we came back in 2005 — we bought the brand back; a bunch of Rhode Islanders got together, wanted to restart it and do it right — is we actually found a guy named Bill Anderson (in California), and he was in his 80s ... and he was our brewmaster in the ’50s and ’60s back in the heyday. And he still had the recipe.”
The new owners flew in Anderson, who worked on the recipe for a month until he said, “This is what I was brewing back then.” Anderson died in 2017.
The lager is still the mainstay, but eventually the new owners “just sort of got the itch to try out some other drinkable styles,” said Mansuetti.
Fresh Catch is a beer the brew team put together a while ago in a slightly different recipe, says Mansuetti. The previous version was known as Summertime Citra Ale, which was popular.
“We wanted to keep it around but it said ‘Summertime’ on the can,” Mansuetti laughs. “So we wanted to kind of rebrand it (and) we reworked the recipe a little bit. It’s a nice, light golden ale or blonde ale that we dry hop with citra hops.”
So what makes a beer that goes with seafood?
“The idea is that fish, and seafood in general, has pretty delicate flavors, and they’re so subtle and complex,” Mansuetti said. “And if you’ve got a beer that is super hoppy or has all this malt character or is bitter, it really kind of gets in the way of really tasting some of those ... flavors.”
In keeping with the brand name’s classic American lager, Fresh Catch is “nice and light. (The) citra hops ... give a little bit of a grapefruit and just a little bit of a passion fruit kind of aroma to it.”
The hugely popular local breweries have opened in post-industrial spaces across the state (New England Brewing, Hanging Hills, Hog River, Thimble Island), with hoppy IPAs and boutique brews that seldom include the word “lager.” Narragansett isn’t trying to do stouts, porters and sour beers. “There’s no hiding it,” says Mansuetti, “lagers are our flagship. It’s our beer, it’s what we’ve been brewing for 128 years.”
So while the company has come up with an IPA called It’s About Time, “Narragansett has always wanted to brew beers that are drinkable and balanced . ... You’re not going to see too many ... 10 percent (alcohol) or double IPAs. It’s just not really in our DNA.”
There is another major twist in the Narragansett story. The original location of Narragansett’s brewery was a huge plant that had since been torn down, and the reboot effort ran into red tape and failed deals to secure a new location, until about four years ago when owners were 11 days away from signing the deed to a new brewery space. And then? “It went up in a five-alarm fire right beforehand,” says Mansuetti. “And (he sighs) ... it just made us laugh at that point because it kept getting snake-bit.”
About two years ago, the group teamed up with a company called The Guild in Pawtucket and built a collaborative brewery
there, moving in about 18 months ago. Some smaller breweries also use it. Narragansett, while not very big still, sells its beer from Maine to Florida, after adding the Georgia market a month ago.
“We still don’t have our own tasting room or tap room, where everybody else does,” says Mansuetti. “But what’s been fun for us is it makes us go out into bars and restaurants and do this kind of stuff.”