A Day at Daydreaming Brewing Company
After visiting Daydreaming Brewing in downtown Derry, trying each of their eight available beers (small pours shared with my wife, and accompanied by food, don’t worry) and spelunking through the website of the mini-conglomerate of which it is a part (more on that below), I now have so many bits of
BREWERY SCENE
by Jeff Rogers
After visiting Daydreaming Brewing in downtown Derry, trying each of their eight available beers (small pours shared with my wife, and accompanied by food, don’t worry) and spelunking through the website of the mini-conglomerate of which it is a part (more on that below), I now have so many bits of info about Daydreaming swirling through my head (see what I did there?) that I don’t know where to begin.
So let’s start with a quote from their website: Be A Fruit Loop In A World of Cheerios. I think that represents them well, they seem to enthusiastically embrace difference. (Plus, I want that on a T-shirt!)
As one example of that, they brew and serve cask ale, an ancient beer style still found in Britain but quite rare in the U.S. What is a cask ale, you may reasonably ask? These ales live virtually their entire lives in the cask in which they were born, from initial fermentation until serving. Most importantly, their carbonation arises only as a natural by-product of the fermentation, and not from the introduction of pressurized carbon dioxide. These beers are served from the cask, not from a pressurized keg. They typically offer more varied and nuanced flavors and aromas than beers whose carbonation was added under high pressure, and have a shorter shelf life once opened.
Daydreaming doesn’t just occasionally serve cask ale – they typically have at least one cask available. And they hold an annual event focused entirely on cask ale, which they call CASK.ON. This year it will be held on Saturday, March 30. Sadly, tickets are already sold out. (However, if you are really jonesing for some cask ale intensity, two weeks later in Boston you can attend NERAX 2024, the New England Real Ale eXhibition.
Daydreaming’s owner, Andy Day, was awarded a scholarship in 2019 to attend a 9-day training program in London. He was the sole U.S. citizen given the scholarship that year. Since then, Daydreaming has engaged in ramping up local awareness of cask ale.
Even Daydreaming’s non-cask beers have a certain idiosyncratic slant to them. Of the eight that we tried, all had some aspect that were unusual and interesting. None would fit the descriptors “boring” nor “ordinary.”
Some of this may come from their “Livin’ the dream” program where, for a fee, you and some friends can join the brew team for a day, and experience first hand the brewing process.
The Space
Daydreaming Brewing Company is located in the middle of downtown Derry at 1 1/2 East Broadway, right next door to Cask & Vine. An inside passage connects the two spaces, which share the same address, as does Doire Distilling. (These form the mini-conglomerate I mentioned earlier.) The businesses are all co-owned & operated by Andy Day & Alana Wentworth, who have been working together for years, going back at least as far as The Drinkery, which sat under the old Tupelo Music Hall. Apparently ideas are constantly fermenting in their heads and cannot be stopped – but the results seem to benefit us all.
In keeping with Day’s love of traditional British ales, the interior of the shop adopts some of the appearance of a British pub.
Meanwhile, the west-facing side of the building features the colorful mural shown below:
The Food
At the bar in Daydreaming you can order from the appetizers menu of Cask & Vine. We had steak & cheese eggrolls – delicious! – and a spinach artichoke dip with house-made pita chips which was also quite yummy. Together they balanced our flight of eight small pour beers very nicely.
The Beers
Our flight is shown above. All were very good, and, as noted above, all were interesting. Below are, from left-to-right, their names and alcohol-by-volume levels, along with a few notes.
1. Castle Crashers Wee Heavy – 8.5% ABV – notes of nuts and chocolate
2. Broadway Bitter ESB – 4.9% ABV
3. 102+ Reasons NEIPA – 6% ABV
4. Chewbocka Weizenbock – 7% ABV — very clean and light
5. Ya Guy! Mai Tai NEIPA – 6% ABV
6. Hellish Rebuke Imperial Sour Red Rye – 8.5% ABV
7. Successful Therapist Amber – 5.2% ABV – flavors of a brown ale, with just a hint of sour
8. ON CASK: Successful Therapist Amber w/ cinnamon – 5.2% ABV – the cinnamon was a tasty addition!
Just the Facts
Daydeaming Brewing Company is located at…
1 1/2 East Broadway,
Derry, NH, 03038.
Phone number: 603.965.3454
Hours:
Sun – Mon … Closed
Thu – Fri … 4 – 7 p.m.
Sat … 1 – 7 p.m.
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