Pretty Things Beer & Ale Project Calls It Quits

Brewer Dann Paquette. / Photo via Facebook

Pretty Things Beer & Ale Project, with its idiosyncratic, Belgian and German-inspired brews and hand-drawn labels, has brewed its final beer.

“We hope our beers brought you joy and brought you closer together. There’s no greater goal for a batch of beer or a project like ours,” co-owner Martha Holley-Paquette wrote in a blog post that crashed the gypsy brewery’s website this afternoon. “It’s time to draw the curtains and head off to a new adventure.”

Pretty Things was a passion project for Holley-Paquette and her husband, brewer Dann Paquette, who produced their first batch of the American saison that would eventually become Jack D’Or in 2008. Throughout its tenure, Pretty Things brewed at Buzzards Bay Brewery in idyllic Westport, on the south coast of Massachusetts. In a long interview with Boston in 2013, Paquette shared the reasons why they never invested in their own space: “The first thing that would happen if we built a brewery is that I would have to be a supervisor and I wouldn’t be doing what I love. That’s the key,” he said.

At that time, Paquette was quiet about the future of Pretty Things. The name, in homage to a forgotten British pop band that “essentially became a cult phenomenon enjoyed mostly in their native land, and only for a short window of time,” Christopher Hughes wrote, may have been “a strange harbinger for Dann’s gypsy brewery.”

“When asked about its fate, [Paquette] says, ‘It’s alright! This has been really good. If nothing else it’s been an amazing four years. Maybe we’ll do it eight years or ten years. Everyone’s saying, ‘You’re going to be big some day.’ No, we’re not going to be big. We’re as big as we’re going to get. Enjoy it now.'”

For seven years, Jack D’Or, Baby Tree Quad, export stout Babayaga, harvest amber Field Mouse’s Farewell, and others helped earn Pretty Things a Top 5 place among New England breweries. Paquette-Holley said in today’s post that the final batches of beer are shipping out over the coming weeks, and that their brews will be available “through at least January 2016.”

We have a feeling they’ll leave shelves pretty quickly.

Boston magazine has reached out to Dann and Martha Paquette for more about their “new adventure.”