 by Jesse May Issue 39 (December 07-February 08) [Copyright © 2007, The Valley Table] The Spotty Dog Books and Ale sells C. H. Evans Ales, currently brewed out of The Pump Station, a brewpub in Albany that has, in one incarnation or another, been brewing beer since 1787. The beer at The Spotty Dog issues from taps installed behind a bar that stands at the head of the store and which is followed by deep aisles of books and art supplies. All this is contained in a renovated firehouse on Hudson's main street. Upon the facade of the firehouse, in stone, is the name "C. H. Evans." The beer is 220 years old, the firehouse 117, and The Spotty Dog, 2. The Spotty Dog fuses beer's post-revolutionary history, the town of Hudson's own spotty history, and an old, old brewery's history into a single, inimitably charming and idiosyncratic store. Kelley Drahushuk, a young woman with a mane of auburn curls and a laugh both generous and assured, holds the figurative leash to The Spotty Dog. How the Dog came to heel, so to speak, is the story of Drahushuk's twofold inheritance: from her mother and father (with the onomatopoeic Ukrainian last name--imagine the sound of a scythe taking down patch of grain), and from an uncle who inherited the name of a centuries-old brewery. Founded in 1787, Drahushuk's forbear, C. H. (that's Cornelius Henry) Evans, bought into the brewery around 1807. The family took total ownership in the 1860s. "That's when the brewery achieved its major growth. For a time, [the beer] was sold all over the country, as well as Europe," Drahushuk explains. To illustrate, she gestures to numerous poster-sized ads around the store's interior. "These are reprints of little, tiny ads that ran in Harper's Monthly and Life," she smiles. "They actually tout the health benefits of drinking beer--'It takes out wrinkles!' 'Helps build muscle!' Some of the stout ads are really funny. They say it's great for women who are lactating--you know, a good night's sleep for the baby." (Nearby Keegan Ales offers a stout, the name of which is quite clever, provided one is privy to Kelley's particular bit of historical obscura. It's called "Mother's Milk.") C. H. Evans flourished upstate for the very good reason that New York City had a foul water supply unsuitable for brewing purposes until 1845, at which point crystal clear water from the Hudson Valley and C. H. Evans's own backyard began pouring in--water that had been, as evinced by the ads, a major selling point. In 1890, C. H. Evans was not just a brewer but also the mayor of Hudson, and the block upon which his house was built had no firehouse. "If you go through Hudson, you'll see almost all the blocks have a firehouse on them--that was your fire insurance," Drahushuk explains. "In City Hall they have all the pictures of the mayors. My ancient relative--it's kind of funny--he's got these giant muttonchops. My uncle Neil actually is C. H. Evans IV." The beer was brewed, successfully, up until Prohibition, and then for a few years as a "near beer" (a legal, under .5 percent alcohol approximation of beer) that "failed miserably," Drahushuk says. "Everybody started bootlegging about a year or two in." Through all this, America's oldest breweries (Yeungling, for example) survived by finding loopholes by which they could keep their licenses: A brewery could claim to be brewing medicinally, for example, or simply produce the malts with which beer could be home-brewed. C. H. Evans, however, would have no part of it. "My family was just disgusted," Drahushuk says. "They closed the brewery and said, 'This is ridiculous. Forget it.'" After Prohibition, the family sold C. H. Evans. "The actual building, legend has it, fell into mob hands--Legs Diamond supposedly owned it for a time," Drahushuk says. "At one point (I forget the year) it burned down under spooky circumstances. The actual brewery--the physical building--was no more, but for a couple of years after Prohibition they licensed the name and the logo and the look to Barman's Brewery, in Kingston; they brewed under the Evans name for a couple of years and then they went under. And that was that, until my uncle Neil decided to open his brewpub in Albany." (That was 1998; the brewpub was and is The Pump Station. It is, indeed, housed in a pump station--in a bit of historical serendipity, one that was used to send water to New York City as of 1845.) Then the firehouse in Hudson, which operated until 2002, went up for sale and two of Drahushuk's uncles, including Neil, purchased the building with the intent of creating another arm of the brewpub. He approached Drahushuk and her husband, who at the time had an art supply store down the street, thinking they could do something with the building, as he was simply too occupied with the thriving Pump Station. "My husband thought 'bookstore,' and I said, 'Well, we'll probably have to put the art supplies in there, too.' So my uncle said, 'How about an art-supply-bookstore-with-beer?' And we said 'Why not?' And people love the idea! They come in and go, 'Oh my god, you have beer! And books!' The idea went over well: People think it's great to be able to sit down with a book and a glass of wine or beer and relax. They call it a concept. I didn't really approach it as a concept, but if you like it, hey, good, it makes me happy." The concept and execution indeed make for a marvelous environment. "It's something that distinguishes us from, say, a big chain bookstore," she continues. "Although they have coffee (as we do), they haven't yet jumped on the beer-and-wine bandwagon." (The vision of a damp beer stain on the thin, gray, fireproof carpeting of a Borders just does not compute.) "People are always asking, 'Is that a problem? Do people spill stuff? Do people get in fights?'" Drahushuk says. "We're not really a bar crowd, so to speak--people here won't look at you lasciviously and try and get you drinks. And we don't stay open really late--on weekends we're usually open until 9. We're not selling shots, we're not selling funny drinks. We sell good beer and nice wine. And if people want to have their good beer and nice wine, then they're not here to get rip-roaring drunk and cause debauchery." These days, The Spotty Dog plays host to myriad activities with minimal debauchery: movies on Thursdays, the requisite midnight Harry Potter-release party, a pub-style Quiz Night (wherein each week's winning team gets to pick the next week's music selection--sometimes-champions, team Black Sabbath, generally picks, well, you know). "The community's been very supportive of us, we've been lucky," Drahushuk says. "This was a town that didn't have a bookstore and it's getting harder and harder to run just an independent bookstore. The markup on books is just terrible. So you have to have lots of other things to make up for that shortfall. Whereas, me--I'm diversified," she laughs. Thus, The Spotty Dog is a bar subsidizing a bookstore subsidizing an art-supply store subsidizing a bar. Then there's the beer, which in the bookstore/art store scheme of things has not been given short shrift. Of the eight taps, five are C. H. Evans standards, and three are given over to rotation, which Drahushuk vows are "always something fairly unique. We keep it local; we have Hennepin on quite a bit." (Hennepin, from Cooperstown's Brewery Ommegang, is one of the original American beers brewed in the hallowed Belgian tradition.) Also on tap recently was nearby upstart Chatham Brewery's excellent Porter. And what of C. H. Evans's offerings? "I've found that people who 'don't like beer' tend to like something we have on tap," Drahushuk observes. "We'll start them with the Hefeweizen. I tend to think they've never tried anything but a Coors Lite, or something that really sucks, so when they try a beer that's tasty they're like, 'Oh, wow, who knew?' We sell a lot of the Pale Ale, which is still the flagship beer, but people tend to like both the Pale Ale and the Brown Ale. They're both quite hoppy, so it's sort of surprising to me that they go that way." (Though hoppy, the quality of hops tended toward floral notes rather than the gut-burning, hop scorch of which so many craft breweries are enamored.) Evan's Blonde, playing gentle malt notes all the way, emphasizes just how accessible beer is at The Spotty Dog, something that always has been beer's unheralded virtue. "Years ago, before our store opened, I went out with my uncle, C. H. Evans IV, and he asked me what I knew about beer," Drahushuk recalls. "I said, 'I don't really know anything about beer, but I know what tastes good.' And he said, 'Well, that's all you really need to know.'" The Spotty Dog Books & Ale, 440 Warren Street, Hudson (518) 671-6006 |
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