Wandering Star Craft Brewery

Awesome awesome awesome! About as grassroots craft beer as you can get. In this small, blue warehouse/​barn you will fine some delicious beer. Depending on what is being brewed you can try as many samples of beer as you would like — for free. That’s right, they let you taste their beers — and they were all good. Super friendly people who know what they are doing Since it is a very small production they only do kegs so you can buy grolwers on site. You can get Catcher in the Rye at Wahconah Park and various bars in the Berkshires. They are expanding their distribution into New York and Eastern MA so keep an eye out for their beers. I sampled 5 — all different styles — and they were all fantastic.

AWESOME beer, friendly people.

Putting in a four-​star review as a placeholder until I try more of their beers.
This brewery opened sometime after the demise of PIttsfield Brew Works in 2010. The city has had trouble holding down a brewPUB, the Brew Works being at least the second, if not the third, to try and make a go of it on Depot St.
However, Wandering Star does NOT have a pub, and is a distribution-​only microbrewery. On top of that, it does not appear that they sell beer in bottles, but rather only in kegs, to be served at bars and restaurants.
Despite its Massachusetts address, a quick look at their website shows that they are rather hard to find in the Commonwealth, available at 15 total establishments, only four of which are outside of the Berkshires — two spots in Cambridge, one in Worcester, one in Athol. Fortunately, I happen to pop in to the latter two fairly often, so by happy accident I’ve had two of their beers! They seem to be aiming at the New York market — mostly NYC, where they are available at several dozen bars and restaurants.
Their ‘Mild at Heart’ was on tap at the Armsby Abbey in Worcester in the early autumn and was very good. I won’t pretend to remember and spew any tasting notes at you, but I know that I enjoyed it, and it was true to style.
The ‘Berkshire Hills 1 201′ is a Saison brewed in the Belgian style, with local malts from Hadley MA in the Pioneer Valley. Absolutely delicious, and comparable in quality to Pretty Things wonderful ‘Jack D’or’. Wandering Star’s description states that they made this Saison with many local ingredients in an ironic nod to the Commonwealth’s silly notion that they could require all small breweries with a ‘farmer/​brewery’ license to source 50%+ of ingredients for all their beers, from MA. Which, if you know anything about MA’s extremely high percentages of both forest cover and suburbia, you know that there is very very little extra space for commercial crop farms, was an extremely laughable notion that only Boston bureaucrats could conceive. Luckily they realized this and did not strip a plethora of small breweries of their licenses.
I’ll review more of Wandering Star’s beers soon, I hope, and more fully, if I can manage to find them!