Drinking in Boston: Summer Beer and the Living is Easy

You’re sitting on the back porch, beer in hand, beads of condensation rolling down its sides. It’s warm outside, very, and you wipe the sweat off your forehead. You take a long swig. It’s a summer beer: light and refreshing and everything you need for a steamy summer afternoon.

In Boston the temperature got up near hot the last few days, so we thought we could finally talk about summer beers. Breweries in the New England area go mad for summer beer, presumably because they’re so excited to see the sun after months of snow and ice. We recently sampled one, Gritty McDuff’s Vacation Land, and then compiled a list of other popular local summer beers.

Vacation Land is a clear, golden, sudsy beer. The first sips have a very hoppy, bitey opening, but this softens as the beer warms. One imagines this would happen quickly outside on a summer’s day. The hoppyness turns into the tartness of citrus, followed out by a faint feel of butterscotch and an orangey finish. Of course, this is only one of many to try in the area.