One of our goals this summer was to head down to Stockbridge, MA, to re-visit the Norman Rockwell Museum to see their Art and Humor of MAD Magazine exhibit (which is on display until October 27th; I really highly recommend it). Stockbridge is about a three hour drive for us, especially if we eschew the particularly boring I-91 drive, so we decided it would be best if we at least got a light meal before heading north. Looking around the greater Stockbridge area, we decided to take a short drive to the south to visit Barrington Brewery & Restaurant.
In a world where the craft beer movement has really exploded, and it seems that every little New England town is sprouting a new craft brewery, Barrington Brewery is one of the older, wiser tribal elders, having been open for almost thirty years (they opened in 1995). The brewery and restaurant is located on the north end of Great Barrington, in a jumble of converted barns and outbuildings that long ago were the Crissey Dairy Farm (they’ve more recently built a new banquet hall from recycled wood that they named after the old Crissey Farm). They’ve nestled a 7 barrel brewing system (powered by the solar array across the parking lot), a bar, and a dining room into the converted barn, with a nice outdoor beer garden as well. The dining room had a nice, old, brick floor and wooden booths, reminding me of the late Seven Barrel Brewery in Lebanon (another brewpub founded in that era). But since we were just having a light meal to tide over to dinner, we opted for the bar.
Barrington has some good beer, and like a lot of the more venerable brewpubs has a distinctly more varied menu than just “IPAs”, but like any other craft brewery these days, they also have a handful of really good, hop-forward IPAs. I did two, starting with their Monument Mountain IPA (named after the nearby mountain, which I need to add onto my hiking “to-do” list), a nice, clear, and crisp West Coast-style IPA. I also had a half pint of their East Coast style Hopland IPA on cask, which was particularly enjoyable for one of the last warm days of summer.
Not being too hungry, we opted to split a ploughman’s lunch and a lobster roll. Yeah, I’m well aware that the Ploughman’s Lunch, that combination of bread, cheese, and pickle doesn’t trace back to ploughmen, but the UK Cheese Council’s effort to increase UK cheese consumption, but I still enjoy a good ploughman’s platter. While not having a lot of variety (some sausge, two cheeses, some apples, and some bread), the quality here was quite good: The sausage was a flavorful and rich dried soppressata, the cheddar an very nice and generaous portion of an aged cheddar that even had some good crystals in it, and a wedge of St Stephen Triple-Cream Cheese (from Four Fat Fowl, a local dairyrm). All in all, a good accompaniment for the hoppy beer.
And, since it was still high lobster season… well, you can’t have too many lobster rolls. The version at Barrington was good: a reasonably generous portion of lobster salad, with the requisite few larger pieces of crab meat that better rolls have, a good slightly toasted roll, and some surprisingly good sweet potato fries.
Overall, we liked Barrington Brewery & Pub. The beer is good, the staff friendly, the food reasonably-priced and delicious, and in a world of a new brewery opening (and often another closing) per week, it’s good to see one of the older places still doing a good job. I’ll definitely come back to hike Monument Mountain and then have another post-hike visit.
