10 questions with Springdale Beer’s Joe Connolly

Walk me through the Springdale lineup revamp.

The new core lineup is Brig Mocha Stout, Pearly White Ale, and Springdale IPA, our new flagship that’s a culmination of years of playing on the IPA and experimenting with hop-forward beers. It’s sort of a hybrid between some of those older-school, bitterness and hop-forward beers, with what we appreciate about New England styles.

And then solidifying our core lineup is Citrus Got Real, our tart ale which comes out of our program marrying acidity with some fresh, vibrant fruit. That beer’s got grapefruit and orange zest in it.

Why did you decide to revamp now?

That’s an interesting question to answer. When we started Springdale, we may have had one person employed by us who was a quote-unquote marketer, and worked with a lot of third-party agencies. In the last three years we’ve hired an entire marketing team. We were taking a look at where Springdale was going in the last year, all the things we were trying to say in our messaging and our packing. We realized we were all trying to say the same thing, but we weren’t speaking with one voice. Some of our packaging — all the IPAs were tied together, but they were tied together around silly names, didn’t have enough information on them.

I feel like lots of breweries have gone away from the sillier names and call their IPA an IPA, or their lager a lager.

I think that’s a fair observation. With the amount of choices a consumer is presented with when they visit their local store or bar, I think it’s pretty necessary that we communicate what we’re doing. There are still a lot of craft breweries who kind of go the opposite direction and have really crazy labels and crazy names.

Your job has shifted since we last talked, right?

My title is now director, but I had been doing this kind of work for a while now. I’m basically the liaison between our public-facing operation, our sales team, our marketing team, and our production team, and hopefully making the whole thing work.

Springdale is three years old. What have you learned in that time?

I think back a lot to the beginning of Jack’s Abby. I wasn’t on the opening team, I was a fan. And one of the reasons I was a fan: Remember like the renaissance fair labels? That was all so kitschy to me, but the quality of the liquid was so good. I loved that these guys are giving a [expletive] about what’s inside the packaging 100 percent, and what’s outside doesn’t matter to them.

One of the things I’ve learned in the past year is that it’s no longer good enough just to have great liquid. I was always one that said the package doesn’t matter. Image is a part of what we do, and communicating it the right way is hugely important.

And I’ve learned that barrel-aging beers is super hard, and super fun. It’s something that’s always going to be a part of what we do, and we’re definitely going to be applying the message through that identity.

The new Springdale IPA.

You launched Springdale with one of the largest barrel programs in the state, right?

I still think that we probably have one of the largest programs in New England, if not the largest. That category is quite challenging. The unspoken ingredient is time and labor. The package is never going to really do it justice.

Beers like that traditionally haven’t been priced like, say, a $100 bottle of wine. How do you price a beer that you spent three years making?

One thing you can’t really do is whip out the calculator and say, ‘This is how much this beer cost to make.’ You have to assume that some of them are going to be quicker, and the margins might be there for you, and some of them will be longer and you just won’t make money off them. We try to be consistent about pricing and we try to be accessible. We don’t want to be purveyors of $100 bottles of wine. We like that anybody can come to the beer table.

Are you starting to see some of the fruits of that barrel program?

One beer I really feel we did an outstanding job with is called Friends in Merlot Places, which is aged on merlot grape must in red wine barrels, and we made a kind of beer-wine hybridized beer. It’s really a striking purple color, and the wine character married with the tannins from the oak aging really shines. We were so psyched on that that we got a bunch more grape varietals, put them in barrels at higher rates. When we first tasted those beers we were like, ‘whoa’; they were really strange. They took much more time than we expected to come around, but they were worth the wait. That whole wine and beer aging concurrently thing is something we’re really excited about.

You do these Not Stirred, cocktail-inspired beers. How many of those have there been?

I think I have eight that we’ve done. We did one, Smoking Bishop, that’s a mulled wine cocktail. And then we just released last week in the barrel room a tequila barrel aged one. It kind of reminds of Key lime pie. That series is super fun. It’s really refreshing to approach these beers from a whole different perspective, seeing how can we create these cocktail flavors with the very different materials that we use. I find myself geeking out with bartenders about ingredients and process, and hitting the cocktail books more often than the beer references for these. It keeps us creatively engaged and on our toes.

It’s my contention that Springdale may be one of the most underrated breweries around. I’m wondering if you agree.

Yeah, I mean I think we partially brought that on ourselves, by slapping “Springdale by Jack’s Abby” on our packaging for two years. That was a really hard conversation to have in-house. They’re in our DNA, and that will always be true. But I saw on a menu “Springdale by Jack’s Abby Pearly Whit.” Nothing emphasized, just one long thing, then the number. That was kind of the moment for me. We’re making ourselves hard to find.

I do agree that we have flown under the radar, and I’m hoping we can rectify it.