“I like the idea of calling a beer pretty,” says Dann Paquette, a brewer with 20 years of experience. He and his wife, Martha Paquette, run the Pretty Things Beer and Ale Project, a company that brews beer without having a place of their own to do the actual brewing.
Pretty Things was born when the married couple Dann, a veteran beer brewer, and Martha, a scientist, came back to Boston after a period living in Yorkshire, England and found themselves with no jobs and a lot of knowledge of English beers.
“We had enough money to brew only one batch of beer,” Martha said while remembering how Jack D’Or, the company flagship beer, was born.
With only $9,000 the couple set up a business, bought the ingredients and the equipment, manufactured the labels, and paid a brewery fee to rent their workspace. After that, they were broke, but they managed to survive with the profits of selling their product.
From brewing the beer to designing and pasting the etiquettes the two of them used to do everything. “We went out every night to promote the beer,” said Dann. Nowadays, they have two employees working with them, they have employed a distribution system, and they brew close to thirteen types of beer.
Pretty Things Beer and Ale Project
They don’t enjoy putting their products into a category and they say each of their beers its is own “creative beast.”
However, Dann is an enthusiast of European beers, particularly the British ones. He enjoys the way that the European brewers played with the water components to affect the taste of the product, something that Pretty Things is not able to do here because of the lack of their own brewing space.
“I used to be the kind of person that, in college, if I brought beer to a party I would be the only one drinking it,” he said when talking about his particular taste in beer. For him, there are a lot of brewers in Boston doing their own thing and their own mixes, but Pretty Things goes to a different place, brewing a product inspired on its owners’ tastes and experiences.
That uniqueness seems to be working for the so called “gypsy brewers.” In 2011 they won the Best of Boston: Locally made Beer, and they were included in the top five New England’s best local brewers by the Yankee Magazine. The list also included the Boston Beer Company, the owners of the Samuel Adams brewery.
But brewing small has not being easy for the couple. “Not having money. That was fun,” said Martha with a sarcastic smile while remembering their first batches of beer and their struggle to sell it. “Once we gave free beer to a bar, which we don’t do anymore, and at the end of the night we decided to share one beer and the bar charged us, after we gave all of that free beer,” Dann says.
One trade of the company is its creative side. From trees that, instead of flowers, had babies, to white bunnies, the couple prints their creativity in each label. But the star is the Jack D’Or: a grain of barley with a curly black mustache that is defined by Martha as “magical” because it produces sugar and creates the beer. He is the picture that appears in every Jack D’Or bottle.
Even thought the company is growing, the couple does not have big plans of opening their own brewery or increasing their production volume. Currently they sell in Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island and also organize tasting events in Massachusetts. They want to keep it that way because, as Martha explained, they love to brew but they also want to enjoy their lives.