Q&A: How a Groupon led to Millbury's newest brewery
Photo | Courtesy of Chris Kozaczka
Penny Pinchers Brewing Co. is located on Elm Street in Millbury
Penny Pinchers Brewing Co. opened on Elm Street in Millbury in December, following a multi-month delay due to the coronavirus. Owned by friends and business partners Jay Rondeau and Jody Barton — both of whom maintain full-time jobs at TJX Cos. of Framingham — the new brewer specializes in small-batch brewing. The taproom-centric brewery includes a core selection of beers, as well as an ongoing rotation of more experimental varieties. The owners spoke with WBJ about what brought them to brewing, balancing a new business with home life and what it was like opening during an historic pandemic.
How did Penny Pinchers come to be?
So, 15 years ago, I actually bought a Groupon to learn how to brew beer. It was for myself, Jody and one of our other friends. A fourth one of our friends actually had opened a brewery in Florida, as well. So, I got the Groupon for the four of us, we learned how to brew beer, and Jody has been in and out of homebrewing over the years. I’ve pretty much been constant.
Every time I would buy new equipment, I would just kind of build towards [the idea] of ‘Oh, if I ever had the chance to open up a small nanobrewery, I’d want this size pot’ or something like that.
Eventually, a few years ago, I started going to some beer tastings and homebrew events, and a few actual brewery tasting events where there were other breweries. I just got a really good reception. At that point, my wife, she’s in marketing, and she was like, we really, really need to try this out. You just have so many people that love the beer that aren’t family and friends, and you will always regret it if we don’t try it out.
So, I talked to a few friends — Jody included — and Jody was really excited to jump on board with us. He loved all the beer and it just kind of made sense.
How did you end up located in Millbury?
We were particularly attracted to it being 10 minutes away from my house. I have two little kids and that was part of the deal with my wife that, if we were going to do this, we should really stay local. That way, any time we’re doing stuff, we’re still close to the house, if I need to brew at night, that kind of stuff. I could do it after bedtime.
But once we started looking, Millbury became very appealing to us. We could see the potential, when Jody and I looked at the space. Elm Street is kind of a main street, we’re right off the Mass Pike, it’s a great location. Route 146 is so close yet it still gives you that nice little town, community feeling. It’s an up-and-coming little hub of a town. We saw the potential for another Hudson. Medusa went in there, and then all of a sudden, all these other businesses started popping up, and the next thing you know, it’s like an old town revived. People are walking around again. We’d love to see that happen here.
What has it been like opening during the pandemic?
It’s been really tough. We were supposed to open last March, so 2020. That was our estimated grand opening, so we would have been having our one-year anniversary last month.
But honestly, at this point we’re at right now, Jody and I feel like it was somewhat of a blessing in disguise. We have a great landlord, and the town was great working with us. It really helped us take something that we were jumping into, for the first time and slow down. Being first-time business owners, we were moving 100 million miles an hour. And [the pandemic] really helped us slow down and make sure we were doing things correctly. It helped us make even better decisions, I think.
Can you tell me a bit about the beer?
We brew one barrel batches at a time, and we’re lucky, sometimes, to even get a full barrel. So the nice luxury with that is that we get to experiment a lot. It feels more like home brewing for fun versus having to brew big, giant batches of beer.
That’s kind of the fun thing for us — we’re not really going to specialize in anything. We’re going to specialize in variety. We started off with three core beers, recipes I’ve really tailored throughout the years. We have a few more core beers that we haven’t even released yet, because we thought it was very important for us to have what we call the yard sale series. It’s our rotating, experimental batches. We’re constantly rotating new styles, different styles, taking traditional styles and putting our own little unique twist on it.
Are you doing any beer to-go?
Every once in a while, we do a growler release. We’ll do a pre-sale for the week and people can pick them up on the weekend, and then every weekend we do allow people to bring in their own unbranded, blank growlers, and then we’ll take them and we’ll fill them up during the week. You can come back and pick them up.
This interview was conducted and edited for length and clarity by WBJ staff writer Monica Busch.
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