September/October 2016 Cape Cod Life Magazine

Taking Flight

Cape Cod Life  /  September/October 2016 / , ,

Writer: Joe O'Shea / Photographer: Dan Cutrona and Jennifer Dow 

Taking Flight

September/October 2016 Cape Cod Life Magazine

Cape Cod Life  /  September/October 2016 / , ,

Writer: Joe O'Shea / Photographer: Dan Cutrona and Jennifer Dow 

Taking Flight, Sept/Oct Cape Cod Life | capecodlife.com

Photo by Dan Cutrona

It’s been a dozen happy, hoppy years

Cape Cod Beer

The seeds of Cape Cod Beer, the Cape’s original craft brewer, were planted in the mid-1990s when engineer Todd Marcus had what he describes as an “a-ha!” moment while visiting a funky barbecue joint in Somerville’s Davis Square.

One night, on a whim, Todd accompanied a co-worker to a brewers’ dinner at Redbones, and when the festivities concluded he made a call to Beth, his wife-to-be and future business partner. “Todd said [in a slurred voice], ‘I know what I want to do with my life!’” Beth Marcus recalls with a laugh. “You’ve been drinking, haven’t you?” she asked, and he responded in the affirmative. “Todd likes to joke that he felt like the bee in the Blind Lemon video [when she found her fellow bees]. He found his people at the brewers’ dinner.”

The next day, Todd still wanted to be a brewer. So the couple made brewing pit stops in Vermont, Maine, and Philadelphia while he learned the craft. The pair came home to the Bay State when Todd landed a job at the Hyannisport Brewing Company in the early 2000s.

When the “Hyport” Brewing Company went belly up, Todd and Beth launched Cape Cod Beer from the old facility in 2004. Todd was the only employee, and he and Beth would load up the family mini-van with beer—often with their two sons strapped in the back seat—and make deliveries across the peninsula.

Cape Cod Beer still distributes its own product, from Plymouth to Provincetown, but with a sleek fleet of delivery trucks. Brewers Todd Marcus, Doug Bogle, Jamison Cabral and Joe Rinaldo, and other staff now work their magic from a larger, modern facility that employs about 20 people year round.

“We’re really, really quality-driven,” says Rinaldo, a native of Concord. “And the best way to ensure quality is to distribute our own beer. We have our own guys in the field who make decisions about the quality of the beer. If a batch needs to be pulled off the shelf, it needs to be pulled off the shelf—though thankfully we’ve never had to do that!”

Joe O’Shea says: Try Cape Cod Red!

Cape Cod Beer is at 1336 Phinneys Lane in Hyannis. For more information, visit capecodbeer.com.