Elm City Brewing Company
222 West St #46,
Keene, New Hampshire 03431
(603) 355-3335

After leaving Manchester, we moved on to Keene and had dinner at
Elm City Brewing Company.
Also located in a converted mill building, the Colony Mill Marketplace, the brewpub was jumping on a beautiful Saturday evening.
Upon being seated, I spotted the glass on the table filled with Trivial Pursuit cards.
Cool, something to do while waiting for our food to arrive!
The menu states that the salad dressings are all homemade. This is always a plus in my book; good bleu cheese dressing is worth the trip alone. The food was phenomenal!
Even though I'm not a huge fan of fruit flavored beer (besides pumpkin), given the name, I had to have the Peachy Keene Kolsch.
Too light and sweet for my palate, but this does make a good session drink for those warm, humid New Hampshire nights and a good brewpub intro for macro-beer drinkers.

Stark Brewing Company/Milly's Tavern
500 Commercial St.
Manchester , NH 03101
Phone: (603) 625-4444

Stark Brewing Company , a brewpub, is in a converted Manchester, NH mill building dating to 1881.
The venue used to be known as Milly's Tavern, but now it seems Milly's is within Stark Brewing Company, a production brewer.
As we approached, the “Yes Pumpkin Ale” sign is quite visible.
Thinking “this had to be from last fall,” I was highly surprised to see Pumpkin Ale listed as being on-tap.
As a fan of this style, I had to sample it. The beer menu states that this is one of their most popular beers and that one can try it either on its own, or with a glass “rimmed with our house blend of sugar and spices.”
Ingenious!
As we later found out, when on a private brewery tour conducted by owner Peter Telge, a master brewer since 1994, the beer is brewed with fresh, locally grown pumpkins, not canned pumpkin as other breweries use.
The ale was dead-on, by far the best I've sampled of the genre. Slightly spiced, not cloyingly sweet, lightly carbonated, amber colored, and the sugar and spice (and everything nice) mix really accentuates the beverage.
This one's a keeper!

There are only taps and the brewery produces 18 different beers, so what's on tap will change with each visit.