In the summer, tourists flock to Salem, Massachusetts for its waterfront access. In the autumn, they come for Halloween, for festivities themed around the Salem Witch Trials. When I visit, the streets are lined with broomsticks and fake spider webbing. Out-of-towners dress up and pose for photos, and locals roll their eyes.
But I’m not here for any of that. I’m here to drink Lager at Notch.
Notch Brewing sits on the South River, which feeds into Salem Harbor, and eventually the Atlantic Ocean. The sky is barely starting to awaken as I pull into its parking lot at 6:50 a.m. I struggle to contain a large yawn, and regret my lack of coffee.
Today, Notch’s co-founder, owner, and head brewer Chris Lohring, and brewer and production manager Brienne Allan, are brewing a batch of Desítka. The brewery first released the 4.2% ABV, 10° Plato Czech Pale Lager in the summer, but this brew day is special: It’s the final run for the beer, which was created to commemorate Notch’s 10-year anniversary.
The brick building that houses Notch’s taproom, a former REO Motor Car Company facility, is largely dark, save for some light escaping through the open garage door. Allan is alone on the brew deck, and she has already started mashing in when I arrive. Lohring joins shortly after, quietly observing alongside me. Typically Lohring and Allan brew separately, but during more intensive brew days like today, the two like to keep each other company.
Translating to “Tenner” or “Ten” in Czech, Desítka is the only surviving element of what would have been a milestone celebration of the brewery’s decade of existence. The beer embodies the traditional processes of the Czech Republic—a triple-decoction mash, open fermentation, and weeks of horizontal lagering—and epitomizes the Notch team’s longstanding commitment to the traditional, sessionable beer styles of Europe.
End to end, the triple-decoction process—which involves three separate instances of transferring a portion of the mash into a separate vessel, boiling it, and then mixing it back in with the main mash—takes a minimum of 10 hours, so the brew day starts before 7 a.m. While Allan busies herself, Lohring turns to me to explain the finer points of the process. Noting my tired eyes, he assures me that we’ll walk to get some much-needed coffee once this first step is complete.
Chris Lohring started his brewing career at Tremont Brewery in Charlestown, Massachusetts in 1993. The second-largest brewery in the state behind Boston’s Harpoon Brewery in the late ’90s, Tremont was traditional, and specialized in English-style Ales. Eventually it sold to a competitor in 2005, and for a time Lohring was a brewer without a brewery.
After making exploratory trips to Germany, the Czech Republic, and other beer-centric European countries, Lohring decided to start Notch in 2010. Named for the pencil mark bartenders make to tally the number of beers a patron has ordered, the brewery was born of Lohring’s ambition to bring the European session beers he had fallen in love with back to the United States, and also to import an ethos around communal drinking.
“I have always enjoyed modest-ABV beer over strong beer, and for the first decade of my career focused on British Ale,” Lohring says. “I took a trip to Prague in 2005 and discovered Desítka (10° Pale Lager) and saw the Czech pub atmosphere, and I had an epiphany about beer. Notch was born from that idea, that modest-ABV Lager is difficult to make, and a sheer joy to drink.”
Lohring stands at well over six feet tall. He is focused and intense, but also calm and kind, with a dry sense of humor. Though quiet and efficient with his words, he speaks with a fierce conviction. Understanding Lohring’s uncommon focus and dedication is key to understanding Notch’s spirit. Not many in the contemporary U.S. craft beer scene have built a successful brewery off the back of session beer—and its accompanying cultural traditions—and stayed true to that course for over 10 years.
“To me, the whole genesis of Notch was based on European beer tradition,” Lohring says. “In terms of drinking beer in volume [...] and not being ashamed of that. And not equating intensity of flavor with quality. That a 4% Pale Lager can be the most beautiful beer in the world. And that’s not the American craft beer market. It hasn’t been. Maybe it’s coming around to that.”
“I decided this is something I want[ed] to do. I told my brewer friends and they all looked at me like, ‘What the eff are you doing?’ Time and place is everything. 22oz bombers of imperial, extreme beer was all the rage. I was going to come out with a six-pack of session beer. They’re like, ‘You’re out of your mind.’”
Notch was, by Lohring’s estimation, among the first breweries in the country to focus exclusively on session beers, which he classes as those measuring in at 4.5% ABV or below. In the early days, Notch’s beers were exclusively contract-brewed, as Lohring wanted to prove out his concept before investing in a taproom and brewery space. The beer was produced at Two Roads Brewing Company in Connecticut, Ipswich Ale Brewery in Massachusetts, and Kennebunkport Brewing Company in Maine. That greater scale meant that Lohring could offer his releases at a “workers’ beer” price point—one that was both affordable and which, Lohring felt, aligned with European beer history.
Lohring was out of sync with the wider industry from the start. In the early 2010s, craft beer was starting to gravitate to juicy, hop-forward beers. As affinity for hazy, New England-style IPAs grew, breweries like Trillium Brewing Company, Tree House Brewing Company, and Other Half Brewing began to steer market trends.
“I decided this is something I want[ed] to do,” Lohring says. “I told my brewer friends and they all looked at me like, ‘What the eff are you doing?’ Time and place is everything. 22oz bombers of imperial, extreme beer was all the rage. I was going to come out with a six-pack of session beer. They’re like, ‘You’re out of your mind.’”
Lohring remembers those early years well, and the difficulty of convincing consumers and peers that lower-strength, Old World styles had a place in craft beer. At the time, some even accused Notch of being a marketing gimmick. “I guess we were ahead of it, right? And when you’re ahead of it, what’s the phrase? ‘Pioneers get slaughtered, settlers prosper,’” Lohring says.
Although Lohring never intended to be ahead of any trend, he does recognize that the timing paid off. “We were definitely way in advance, because everyone, all of a sudden, five years later, was like, ‘Ah yeah, session beer’s the shit. We’re going to come in.’ And then Founders’ [4.7% ABV] All Day IPA comes out. That legitimized the category for us. And then people said, ‘Oh, all right, I see what you guys are doing at Notch. It’s not gimmicky.’”
In July 2016, Notch opened its first brewery, taproom, and outdoor biergarten in Salem, Lohring’s hometown. The space is industrial, but also social. Its brick exterior gives way to high ceilings and steel trusses, and the tap list is hung on the device that used to move engine blocks. The communal seating benches are made from the old wooden ceiling, which was removed when the taproom was renovated.
In the heart of the space is the “stammtisch” room, or “regulars’ table” in German. The area is centered around a large, antlered chandelier, and the walls lined with a single bench that wraps around the room. The seating is a subtle way of communicating that everyone in the space is connected—and is indicative of Notch’s affection for hosting a committed group of regulars.
Spacious headquarters aside, Notch continues to contract brew through Harpoon and Two Roads so it can maintain “workers’ beer” pricing for its 12-packs, something Lohring feels drives the Notch philosophy.
“Look at the beer-producing nations of Europe,” he says. “They all celebrate low-ABV workers’ beer—low-ABV Saison consumed by farmhands, low-ABV Pale Lager consumed by Czech glassblowers, or Bitter and Mild consumed by factory workers in British pubs. These are not beers for deep contemplation and evaluation—they are everyday, no-fuss drinking beers with great flavor and history. At Notch, we hold to the ethic that beer should be affordable, yet priced so our business can operate profitably.”
To make many of those specialized European beer styles, Notch has installed a traditional brewhouse, with open and closed fermentation and horizontal lagering tanks. It is set up for decoction mashing, for British cask conditioning, and features a draft system imported from the Czech Republic. Investing in such technology means Notch has the flexibility to produce a range of traditional beers from various European countries: Its lineup includes Czech Pale Lager, Czech Dark Lager, Altbier, Dunkel, Kölsch, Franconian Kellerbier, Helles, Schwarzbier, German Pilsner, Festbier, Hefeweisse, Zwickel, Rauchbier, Doppelbock—the list goes on.
Despite its time-consuming nature, decoction mashing is one of Notch’s favored techniques. Often used by German and Czech brewers, decoction produces toasty, caramelized malt flavors that are otherwise difficult to replicate. The team employs double decoction in beers like The Standard, a Czech Pale Lager, and Tmavy, a Czech Dark Lager, as well as triple decoction for its 10° Czech Pale Lagers, Tenner and Desítka.
“Over in Europe, every neighborhood has its own, not taproom, but neighborhood brewery. The American beer culture is super antisocial, other than festivals. And even that’s little samples. It’s not a festival where everyone goes and drinks liters of beer and enjoys the beer. Everyone’s walking around judging each other. It’s just bizarre.”
In addition, the team’s horizontal lagering tanks receive heavy use. Leveraging a horizontal lagering tank reduces the pressure exerted on the yeast by expanding the surface area it has to work—and makes it easier for excess yeast, proteins, and other particles to naturally settle out of the beer, producing the clean visuals most drinkers have come to expect from Lagers.
“If we talk about something we want to do, but our brewery’s not set up to do that, we won’t do it,” says Lohring. “From a process standpoint, equipment standpoint, packaging standpoint. Because then we’re kind of just forcing it.”
Traditional Lagers may hold a growing appeal for contemporary drinkers, but most craft breweries still aren’t ready to produce them. “A lot of brewers are set up to do Ales. And all of a sudden Lagers become popular and their breweries are not capable to produce world-class Lager,” Lohring says. “They don’t have a mash mixer so they can’t do step infusion, nevermind decoction. They don’t have the refrigeration capacity to get the wort down to 50° Fahrenheit in 45 minutes. So they have sulfur issues, they have DMS issues. They don’t have the refrigeration capacity to ferment at a cold enough temperature in the middle of summer. They don’t allow for the conditioning time because they’ve got to put beer through at a certain rate to make money. They didn’t set their system and their infrastructure up to make Lager. Or their business model. So there’s compromises on every one of those steps.”
To Lohring, any one of those steps might be inconspicuous on its own, but, when strung together in the brewing process, their lack is magnified, and degrades the quality of the beer. In reverse, however, maniacal attention to detail compounds to produce classical, high-quality beer that is reflective of longstanding tradition.
“People ask, ‘What’s the one thing you really love about the brewery [...] that has been more important than anything else?’” Lohring says. “There’s nothing. It’s all of that. They all add up. On its own, it’s pretty subtle. But, you put 10 things together that add great subtlety—then that becomes something great.”
To Lohring, Notch doesn’t necessarily have a monopoly on brewing and serving traditional European styles in the United States—but he does feel like the brewery’s commitment to the accuracy of those traditions and culture is virtually unmatched.
“We kind of stuck our necks out a little bit,” he says. “These wonderful, traditional beers that U.S. brewers don’t really pay attention to, or haven’t—there’s a place for them. And with that comes the way you drink them, which is really the fun part. We do a Kölsch night, where we only serve in Kölsch stange, and we mimic the Kölsch beer halls of Cologne. And people are like, ‘Wow, this is really cool.’”
Notch’s staffers aren’t the only ones holding themselves to high standards—the brewery’s customers have come to expect the same attention to detail and adherence to custom.
“Someone called us out the other day for putting Altbier in a stange,” Allan says. “And we just say, ‘Yeah we know, but this is what we have.’ Since we take it so seriously, people take us even more seriously sometimes.”
For example, Notch serves its Berliner Weisse, Hootenanny, with woodruff or raspberry syrup, as is typical in Berlin. The team also decided to provide the option of a non-traditional grapefruit rosemary syrup. After posting a photo and write-up on Instagram, one of the first comments noted the inaccuracy. “That’s what we get for trying to be fun,” smiles Liz Olive, the general manager of the Notch taproom since its 2016 opening.
“Yeah, but then you have a brewery next door that is probably putting whatever the fuck they want in anything—like strawberries in Helles,” Allan says. “And everyone says, ‘What a great Helles.’ And you’re just thinking, ‘But you’re making fun of us for putting Altbier in a stange. Are you fucking joking me right now?’ The pressure is real.”
Notch’s strict adherence to historical ingredients and brewing processes extends to the complementary customs around beer drinking—the glassware its beer is served in, the taps the beer is poured from, even the method by which it’s poured.
The brewery’s Czech-made Lukr taps, also known as “side-pull” taps, are a prime example. Lohring guesses that Notch was only the second U.S. brewery to import them, although their popularity has been growing in recent years. “It wasn’t a novelty to us—it was a way to serve Czech beer,” Lohring says. “And we spent a lot of time making sure our staff knows exactly how to pour that beer in a way that is consistent and proper based upon what those faucets are supposed to do. And what you see now is a lot of brewers not taking a deep dive and just saying, ‘Well this is the new trend, we’re going to do this,’ and really not understanding why they’re doing it or how they’re doing it or caring.”
Despite working within an industry that tends to extol pushing the boundaries of new beer processes, styles, and ingredients, Lohring and Allan say they find fulfillment and reward in the challenge of consistently executing centuries-old styles.
“Doing the deep dive and doing the research, you get to learn—and then act it out,” Allan says. “It’s really fun.”
The brewery’s focus on tradition extends beyond beer styles, and hardware. For its staff, intangible heritage is just as vital a consideration.
“Nobody’s getting together and enjoying beer the way that it was meant to be enjoyed,” says Allan. “Over in Europe, every neighborhood has its own, not taproom, but neighborhood brewery. The American beer culture is super antisocial, other than festivals. And even that’s little samples. It’s not a festival where everyone goes and drinks liters of beer and enjoys the beer. Everyone’s walking around judging each other. It’s just bizarre.”
For Notch, the taproom and biergarten experience isn’t just about the space’s beautiful high ceilings, or the water views—it’s attempting to nudge American drinking culture towards the communal traditions of Europe.
“Our culture here [in the United States] is based on intensity and flights and ticking and tasting and not about drinking in a community,” Lohring says. “In the taproom, especially the biergarten, that’s what we’ve really captured in terms of why people like this place. It’s really not overt. But when you come in and you start to hang at Notch, you get a sense of that community, you get a sense of that communal drinking, you get a sense of, ‘I’m going to have a liter, and that’s going to be fun, and I can still get in my car and drive home because it was 4% and I basically had less than two beers.’”
“We’re traditional, not just in process and the brewery; we’re also traditional in experience,” adds Olive. “We care a lot about the community and try to get the community involved with communal seating. From the way we brew the beer to the way we serve the beer, it’s all traditional and experience-driven.”
Given how many of Notch’s principles are enacted within its biergarten, COVID-19 has hit the brewery especially hard, as it’s moved to a safer model for both the staff and customers. “As much as we care about the experience, we care more about the health and safety of our employees, and the public more,” Allan says. “But it hurts. Every single time we pour off the Lukr faucet into a plastic cup, we die a little bit inside. But, we’re doing the best we can.”
Its many festivals are a fundamental component of Notch’s customer experience. Characteristically, the team focuses not just on the beer, but on every ancillary detail: the glassware, the attire, the trays, the food, the music.
“We’re traditional, not just in process and the brewery, we’re also traditional in experience. We care a lot about the community and try to get the community involved with communal seating. From the way we brew the beer to the way we serve the beer, it’s all traditional and experience-driven.”
The effort takes research (to ensure they’re remaining true to historical precedent) and time (typically, a limited-edition beer is brewed for each event). Notch hosts two Bavarian-inspired festivals each year, the first being March’s Starkbierfest (“Strong Beer Festival”). Notch brews a triple-decocted Doppelbock for the occasion, offering a hot loggerhead poker to caramelize the beer foam. The second is Oktoberfest in September, where a classical Festbier is paired with a day full of contests, carnival games, and steckerlfisch (grilled fish on a stick that’s commonly served in biergartens and at folk festivals). The brewery also hosts a Polish festival, a nod to Lohring’s great-grandparents who emigrated from Poland, which comes with an event-exclusive Polish Lager (Piwo) and a Smoked Wheat (Grodziskie), as well as Polish food (pierogi, kielbasa, and sauerkraut) and music courtesy of a local polka band.
“Notch festivals are indeed a lot of work, but worth it because they are magical,” Olive says. “A few times a year we let our hair down and I think customers like to see that side of Notch.”
For all its emphasis on tradition—on reminding capricious American beer drinkers of the older ways, of brewing according to longstanding European styles and practices—the brewery isn’t frozen in time. Despite branding itself as a session beer brewery, Notch is continuously reevaluating its identity, recommitting to the styles of beer it wants to brew and the experience it wants its customers to have.
“We just created new roles for ourselves, collectively called ‘the Innovation Team,’” Olive says. “We meet every Monday and Friday and plan Notch’s future. We ask ourselves, ‘What are our goals? Do we want to be traditional? Are we solely session beer? Are we rock ‘n’ roll? What are we trying to accomplish here?’ We’ve realized that our goals change depending on the consumer we are aiming for. We sell through curbside, the taproom, and then we have our wholesale accounts. So we adapt for each of these different consumers.”
The conversations within the Innovation Team are less disagreements about conflicting visions, and more iterative exchanges to refine the language it uses to communicate its brand, and ensure it continues to reconcile its current place in the market against any future aspirations. Such discussions are indicative of the members’ dynamics—while aligned on values and philosophy, they’re comfortable sharing and debating opinions and nuance.
Lohring gives credit to Allan and Olive as being foundational to Notch, and key drivers of its success. “I’m probably viewed as the leader of this thing, but my God, I have a lot of help. Brienne and I share a lot of the same drive and goals, constant improvement and a large focus on how we can be better,” he says. “Liz reminds us to take a step back and recognize our achievements. Both Liz and Brienne love rigid processes to move projects forward, but they are also incredibly creative and nimble.”
And the team agrees. “I feel that we all have an equal voice, a common goal,” Olive says. “Although we may go about it in different ways, we definitely all have different strengths and weaknesses which together makes us stronger. We all have our different roles that we play. And we play off each other really well. I love working here. I feel equal, which I appreciate.”
“You’re better as a team than you are as an individual,” Lohring says. “I know a lot of breweries are leader-driven, [like,] ‘This guy is doing this.’ And that’s never the truth. That one dude isn’t doing everything. It’s a team. The reason we succeed is because all our skills assembled make us better. That’s good business. If you don’t have that in your company, then you’re a poor leader. You’re a poor business owner.”
As Notch’s forward momentum continues, so, too, do its brewing experiments. The team is always considering which new-to-them styles to brew—both in the session category, as well as higher-ABV beers.
The brewery’s Voll Projekt is dedicated to classical, full-strength beers. “We had this itch to do some of these higher-gravity beers,” says Lohring. “Anything above 4.5%, we put in the Voll Projekt. We call it a full-strength beer, because it is—it’s not a session beer. Most brewers and consumers in the United States think, ‘5[%], that’s a session beer.’ Like it’s binary. Like it is, or it isn’t. No, there’s degrees of strength.”
The Voll Projekt was born out of a yen for experimentation, but also to manage drinkers’ expectations. “We were already doing stronger beers for our festivals, and calling them ‘Notch,’ and that was breaking the promise to the consumer that Notch will keep you safe and not get you in trouble,” says Lohring. “So the first year we did a Festbier, only 5.6, 5.7%, we got lit. Our regulars got lit.”
“I have videos,” Allan replies with a chuckle.
To the team, adhering to the customs of the festival and the beer served supersedes the need to keep everything under the Notch portfolio. “If we’re going to be traditional, we’re not going to make a Festbier at session strength and sacrifice that tradition,” Allan says.
The Voll Projekt also gives Notch the opportunity to brew non-traditional beers, although Lohring and Allan say that’s not the primary motivation for the brand. “We’ve made some IPAs, we’ve done some things under the Pink Boots yearly collaboration brew, that I think fall outside the range of ‘traditional,’” Lohring says. “But we stick our toe in that water a couple times a year, maximum.”
“I know a lot of breweries are leader-driven, [like,] ‘This guy is doing this.’ And that’s never the truth. That one dude isn’t doing everything. It’s a team. The reason we succeed is because all our skills assembled make us better. That’s good business. If you don’t have that in your company, then you’re a poor leader. You’re a poor business owner.”
Despite years of experience brewing classic Czech and German styles, the team still feels like there’s room to refine and improve its processes and beers. “I think [a] reason why we haven’t dove into Belgian beer is we’re still trying to get all of our Czech ducks in a row,” Allan says. “Every single part of it. We’re trying to get all of our German Lagers completely in a row. Because if we’re going to say we’re traditional and we do it right, we want every single part of it to be researched and correct.”
And Notch has found a balance it’s comfortable with, in terms of how to share details of ingredients, processes, and history with its customers.
“We used to not tell everybody things are ungespundet, or open-fermented, or how decocted they are because sometimes we’d say to ourselves, ‘Does anyone really care? Is it worth mentioning?’” Allan says. “And then finally we came to the decision—let’s just own this."
“We did have that moment, maybe it was in the first year, just before Brienne came in,” Lohring says. “We started doing the Standard, our double-decocted Czech Pils. I was really excited about it, so I wrote the description for the menu. And Liz came over and goes, ‘Could you say something about how this beer tastes? Because it’s a really long description about how you made it.’”
“So we went to all-taste,” Allan adds, “and now we’re kind of pulling it back to more process.”
If Notch was ahead of the curve in brewing Lagers and session styles, the brewery sometimes wonders what will come next. “What’s Lager going to be five years from now?” Lohring muses. “I mean, brewers are a creative lot, right? Always wanting to do something new and exciting. We kind of tempered that here by saying, ‘Rather than doing something new, let’s just dive deeper into what we’re doing. That will be our creativity.’”
Notch’s production has consistently been 10,000 barrels per year for the last few years, and roughly 80% of current production is contract-brewed at Harpoon and Two Roads. Lohring works closely with his contract partners to ensure quality and processes for its year-round beers (like its Session Pils and Left of the Dial Session IPA) meet Notch standards. However, Lohring estimates that overall production in 2020 will be approximately 40% lower as a result of the pandemic.
Despite staring down the ongoing financial challenges of the upcoming winter, Notch does have a new project on the horizon. In addition to its Salem headquarters, the brewery is in the process of opening its second location—also a hybrid brewery-taproom-biergarten—this time in the Boston metropolitan area, in Brighton, at an old horse track facility. Although the site didn’t launch this summer as planned, construction continues, and it is now slated to open in April 2021.
“From a business standpoint, it’s an awareness-driver and a trial opportunity, so that we don’t get lost in the shuffle of every new brewery opening up,” Lohring explains. “We’ve been around for 10 years—we want to make sure we maintain our position.”
The new facility will have serving tanks and four horizontal lagering tanks, so Lohring and the team will be able to brew any of the beers in their portfolio at both locations. At any one time, 14 beers will be on tap at the Brighton location (four of which will be Lukr taps), and two bars—one for the taproom and one for the biergarten—will help manage customer traffic in the space.
And with enough space for additional businesses—such as a restaurant, coffee shop, a non-profit, and six vendor stalls—the new space will hopefully be a melting pot, Lohring says, a true biergarten. “I hope it’s simply an extension of what we do in Salem that is embraced in the same way,” he says.
Ten years after being told the concept of a brewery dedicated solely to session beer wouldn’t work, Lohring is reflective of how he and the team were able to successfully build Notch up.
“We were called a gimmick brewery for so long, yet here we are in 2020, still,” Lohring says. “I think we succeeded because we were true to the heritage of these beer styles. It’s easy to put a spin or a riff on a traditional style. It’s much harder to go right at it—and at Notch we go right at these Lager styles, from process to ingredient to service. Also, it’s a reflection on our customers, as they got me to 10 years.”
Today, Lohring is more committed than ever to the challenge of executing centuries-old beer styles.
“I’m doing exactly what I want to do,” he says. “I’ve been doing this my whole career; I’ve finally got to the place that I’m at. Took me a long time to get there, but I’m doing exactly what we want to do.”
Words + Photosby Kristen Foster
