Earth Eagle Brewings is leading a beer revolution focusing not on hops but gruits, and chronicling the journey in a new book.

Ask Earth Eagle Brewings co-founder George “Butch” Heilshorn about his business strategy for attracting a more traditional beer drinker into his Portsmouth gastropub, and his answer may surprise you. “The hardcore Bud Light drinker will likely be disappointed,” he says, sitting in the small bar a cafe-like seating area of his craft beer pub. “The people who come here, they are on a mission.”

That mission, as it turns out, primarily involves gruits—beer that has little to no hops and relies on forged herbs, spices and roots to give it flavor. In fact, so serious is Hailshorn and co-founder Alex McDonald about this style of brewing that the brewery contracts with a forager who collects the spices and herbs from New England forests, swamps, and the seacoast for the house brews. “If you look at the history of beer, it’s only in the last couple centuries that hops became a thing,” says Heilshorn, a former high school guidance councilor. “Hops have nothing to do with alcohol anyway.”

Instead, between March and October, Earth Eagle gets a weekly list of available herbs and spices, and the co-founders along with their brewers go through them to select that week’s brews. Their beer menu changes weekly and sometimes daily, with about a half dozen of their own brews and a half dozen New England-based brews available at any time. Recent featured gruits have included Queen Mojo, featuring mugwort and wild carrot flower, and John’s Cross, featuring St. John’s wort, ginger root, lemon grass, rue and bee pollen.

Earth Eagle Brewings co-founders Alex McDonald and George Heilshorn

Earth Eagle got its start in a backyard when McDonald married Heilshorn’s sister, and the two began home brewing on a backyard picnic table. “We started getting positive feedback, and people started talking about our brews,” Heilshorn says. “And through it all, we just brew to satisfy our own curiosity about all these different styles.” Some of those unique styles are on full display in the form of recipes and history in Heilshorn’s new book, Against All Hops: Techniques and Philosophy for Creating Extraordinary Botanical Beer (Page Street Publishing).

Between the book and the pub (and McDonald and his wife own A & G Homebrew Supply, a beer making supply store tucked into the other side of the building), Heilshorn is convinced the craft market can only grow. “Look, Portsmouth is just on fire. It’s a boom town,” he says. “And 80 percent of the beer market is still that yellow fizzy stuff. As long as those numbers are there, those customers are fair game!”

George “Butch” Heilshorn–co-founder, Earth Eagle Brewings
Portsmouth, New Hampshire
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All photos by Dan Szczesny

The post Doing Gruit Work appeared first on Take Magazine.

Take is going on the road, checking out New England’s corners for everything from the best bodegas to tiny galleries and music spots. We’ll be adding towns as we come across them. Check back regularly for the latest New England finds. Up next? Elm Street in Manchester, New Hampshire. 

Northern New England’s largest city was named by merchant and inventor Samuel Blodget after the industrial city in England and soon became “Manchester in America.” Incorporated as a company town in 1846 under the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company, the city soon became a giant in industrial mill towns.

Today, the city’s main thoroughfare, Elm Street, is one of the longest in the world that dead ends on both sides. And in between, right around City Hall, exists a thriving downtown, given new energy by the expansion of the New Hampshire Institute of Art and the large Southern New Hampshire University campus.

And the best news? The city just signed up for a downtown bike rental program, So, now you can visit these five finds in Manchester, New Hampshire, from the comfort of a touring bike on your next visit:

Vivace Sculpture
Location: In front of SNHU Arena, 555 Elm Street

You can’t miss Vivace! Constructed by the husband and wife artist team of Jonathan and Evelyn Clowes of Walpole, N.H. Vivace’s bold shimmering green, like a giant blade of grass, shoots straight up from a hill near the arena. Since its installation, it’s become quite the meeting spot, or just a nice place for a nap in the grass.

Studio 550 Art Center
550 Elm Street

Studio 550, located in an old renovation red stone, has become an art community, bringing together local artists, photographers, sculptures and kids with a series of classes and shows. Among the events: a pie competition, a chalk art day and a teen art camp.

Milk and Honey Juicery and Cafe
889 Elm Street

For a working class mill town, the opening of a vegetarian juice bar right across the street from City Hall has been a pleasant addition to Elm Street. The items are named after colors of the rainbow with a different color menu sample featured every day. Vegan friendly too!

USA Chicken and Biscuit
990 Elm Street

Sometimes, you just need chicken wings at midnight and if you are in Manchester the family-owned USA Chicken and Biscuit is the place to go. Fresh, clean and usually crowded, this is the place to go for all things fried!

Veterans’ Memorial Park
723 Elm Street.

Manchester’s main downtown park has existed for as long as the city. Stop by to relax and watch the world go by or check out the enormous Civil War monument, sculpted by famous memorial artist Caspar Buberl in 1878. Intown Manchester also holds a series of Thursday and Saturday concerts under the big yellow tent during summer.

The post Five Finds on Elm Street in Manchester, NH appeared first on Take Magazine.

Depending on which door you walk in, SPACE Gallery in Portland, Maine, is either a theatre, a traditional art gallery, an artist studio space, or a presentation hall. But to new executive director Kelsey Halliday Johnson, the organization’s greatest strength is its ability to “cross-pollinate” into a variety of arts and forms.

The non-profit formed in 2002, grew into a large space on Congress Street and helped anchor a burgeoning arts district for the city. Two years ago, after a capital campaign, SPACE bought its building and is now positioned to become a major gallery player for artists from around New England and beyond.

When Take sat down with SPACE Gallery’s new director, she had only been on the job about three weeks. Johnson, 31, was born in Philadelphia and previously held positions at the Michener Art Museum, Locks Gallery, Vox Populi, the Penn Museum, and has taught photography and digital arts at the University of Pennsylvania and Interlochen Center for the Arts.

As set designers in the adjoining theatre hammered away, getting the room ready for a play that weekend, Johnson talked about the draw of a regional gallery, the scale of her expanding organization and the challenges of modern art.

Take: What is it like coming to Portland from Philadelphia? Are there similarities? What did it take to make the leap in geography and scale?

Kelsey Halliday-Johnson: The geography was easy because Maine is really beautiful. I was very excited about that. I’ve been coming to Maine for a long time and in fact had talked in the past about looking for cities to move to and Portland had been on that list. It’s funny though because Philly is a city very much in the shadow of New York and that really affects the cultural sector where there’s only a couple of major commercial galleries and artists get to a certain level of their career and they move to New York or LA. I’ve always shied away from moving to New York and I’m very interested in regional art histories and a non-New York dominated narrative of what contemporary art is, so in that sense it was really about finding another place to be where you can elevate the cultural practice that’s happening with contemporary artists that doesn’t have to be centered around the huge cultural vortex that actually ends up with a lot of incestuous and similar thinking. There’s a lot of exciting and creative projects that can happen outside of that.

T: You come from the James Michener museum. I would imagine that is a very different place than space.

KHJ: I used to also work at Vox Populi, which is a sort of collective model kindred to SPACE. So I was toggling many things to keep my artistic focus, but also expand my skill set. Michener was interesting because it was the first time I ever worked for something that was regionally focused, and I was drawn to how to bring a contemporary program to a regionally focused museum. It’s a special place and I’m interested in how a smaller place can have major art history programs and output. So I feel strongly about looking a little deeper, to be locally focused but national and globally minded.

T: So do you look at SPACE as regional or a national organization?

KHJ: Good question and something I hope we can define in people’s minds and imaginations. I think a lot of people look at the website or something we do and ask if we have a local mandate. SPACE doesn’t but it also has a long history and strong commitment to elevating emerging to mid-career practitioners to larger opportunities and there’s something to be said about aiming for both of those things.

T: Given SPACE’s mutli-media approach to gallery space, how do you pull persons across the genre? In other words, how is someone who is interested in your film series, also come out to a play or gallery showing?

KHJ: Encounters with artists, for me, are the biggest draw. I love art history, but if you’re just reading or seeing, you hit your head against the wall because you want to find the source material. So the fact that we have artist and film maker talks means a lot. Those activities are a way people can realize art doesn’t happen in a vacuum. I’m interested in the idea that the arts are a form of research that has a process and a series of theorems and things that people pursue in their studio, and they reveal the evidence of that search in their final product.

T: As a new director, what’s the big priority, the thing that’s taking your brain space right now?

KHJ: Having worked at an interdisciplinary organization, I’m interested in seeing how we can most clearly explain what we do well and also to create a critical space for artists and their intentions. It’s easy to keep rolling and getting people in the doors for events, but I want to make sure we’re building better archives and creating opportunities for writing and dialogue. I want to be able to explain to people contextually what’s on view. There are people who see contemporary art and don’t feel welcome, so my work right now is to create a sense of “come in and let’s talk about what you see.”

T: Where does SPACE stand in Portland? How are you unique here?

KHJ: I’m in a period of active listening, but my sense is there is a magnetic draw with a certain audience that has been at the heart of this loyal community for a long time. But I also think there are people who walk by our doors and have no idea what we do or who we are. But this is a true arts district that’s going to last and SPACE is crucial to that.

Kelsey Halliday Johnson–executive director, SPACE Gallery
Portland, Maine
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Top image, Kelsey Halliday Johnson

The post Finding Space in Portland appeared first on Take Magazine.

In a tiny village in Crete, photographer and New Hampshire Artist Laureate Gary Samson was walking past a dark doorway when he saw something that stopped him in his tracks. A man, a villager, was sitting by the window in a black shirt. The sun was illuminating the side of the man’s face. “I had to photograph him,” Samson says. “He didn’t know much English and I didn’t know Greek, but he nodded his head, and so I took some shots.”

Samson pauses while recalling the story. “After, I could tell he was pleased.” It’s not easy pulling art out of portraiture, but Samson, 66, has made a career out of it. He’s been taking pictures since he was a teenager. Just last month, he retired as the chair of the photography department at the New Hampshire Institute of Art, a position he held for 16 years. And for the past six years, Samson has traveled to Greece with photography students, in a whirlwind teaching experience that has been the centerpiece of his hands-on approach to the art of the camera.

Greece, photo by Gary Samson

During his trips, students take between 2,000 and 4,000 photos on a variety of subjects like architecture, graffiti, culture, and portraits. And in the end, Samson works closely with them to produce a book of each student’s work. This approach, according to Samson, allows him to become familiar with each student, to draw out their talents, to make photography personal.

Greece, photo by Gary Samson

That’s much the same approach he’s used for the subjects in his portraits. His work is expressive, and sometimes even startling in how close and personal his subjects are in his photos. “If I do a portrait, I have to talk to you to draw you out, maybe even come to your home or work. I want to get to the real person,” he says. “It can be an intimate project. With a portrait, I’m trying to connect to something that transcends language.”

Samson was born and raised in Manchester, the son of French-Canadian parents that named him after film star Gary Cooper because they wanted him to have an American sounding name. Besides his work as a photographer, Samson has also produced and filmed several documentaries about his native city and New Hampshire.

Growing up in an old mill town, Samson credits the work of Lewis Hine, who took pictures of child labor in the mills, or the great Lotte Jacobi, who lived in New Hampshire and became Samson’s mentor and friend, for inspiring and encouraging him as he pursued his craft. Now that he’s retired, Samson plans on focusing his work on laureate projects, which includes some upcoming shows and continuing to take students to Greece.

But mostly, Samson is interested in being a role model for artists just beginning to learn their trade. “The idea is that if you look at the world through the eyes of a child, everything seems fresh and new,” he says. “I’ve been able to be excited about my art, have never felt jaded. I want to continue to bring that to students.”

Gary Samson – NH Artist Laureate
Manchester, New Hampshire
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Top image, October, New Orleans, photo by Gary Samson

The post The Soul of a Subject appeared first on Take Magazine.

Early in Manuel Ramirez’s role as the vice president of creative direction for the non-profit Positive Street Art (PSA), he came across a couple teenagers tagging a wall on a bridge underpass. Ramirez stopped to watch and was actually able to admire the teens’ handiwork, given his own background growing up in Brooklyn doing his own public “art.” “The next day, I saw that one of our own walls had been tagged, and with the same signatures of the kids I saw,” he explains in his organization’s downtown Nashua office. “They also wrote ‘This is not art’ on our mural.”

The moment was a turning point for Ramirez, as the object of PSA was to both change the attitudes that the public has about graffiti, but also to provide a safe and creative outlet for street artists to show their skill without vandalizing property. “Just because it’s vandalism, doesn’t mean it’s not art,” Ramirez says. “If we could just guide these kids away from destroying property and get them to express themselves in a safe way and safe place, then maybe we can lessen the public’s concern as well.”

The organization was started in 2012 by Ramirez and the group’s president, Cecilia Ulibarri, with the express purpose of finding what’s called a Free Wall in the city of Nashua, a place where graffiti artists could focus their skills without damaging property. “We wanted this to be a project that highlighted the positive sides of graffiti, that’s how the name came about,” he says.

Manuel Ramirez and the Gratitude Wall, Positive Street Art

But after reaching out to some crowd-sourcing think tanks, PSA realized they had something a bit bigger on their hands. The local Dunkin’ Donuts owner handed over a huge wall that faced some railroad tracks, along with a check for $1,000. Positive Street Art was on its way. The mayor and several aldermen got on board, and pretty soon PSA was fielding calls from all around the city from businesses that wanted murals on their property. Now, PSA has created and maintains about 30 walls throughout the city and a couple in surrounding towns. And when a new request comes in, they have a corral of artists that can either bid on or sometimes get assigned the work.

And those Free Walls they originally wanted? The city now has two, one a beginning artist wall and one a more advanced wall where graffiti artists can ply their trade. The group’s most recent project, the Gratitude Wall, is their largest yet, 100 feet long on the side of a retailer that sells rugs. Ramirez said they reached out to the community for positives words or phrases—such as loyalty, strength, peace, etc.—and now those words glow in the beams of a bright yellow sun. As we stood there in front of the mural talking, a middle-aged woman in a minivan rolled by, stuck her head out the window and asked if one of us was the artist. I pointed to Ramirez. “This is wonderful,” she says. “Thank you! So much better than looking at an ugly wall.”

Manuel Ramirez–vice president of creative development, Positive Street Art
Nashua, New Hampshire
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The post #TakeAction: Changing Perspectives on Graffiti appeared first on Take Magazine.

Molly Brown’s new band, Gilliver, seems as organic as an afterthought—a new voice coming out of Peterborough, rife with whispery vocals and an earthy sound straight out of the catalog of Cowboy Junkies or Mazzy Star.

The music is even more impressive when you consider that two main sources of inspiration for the singer-songwriter is doom metal and traditional Bulgarian women’s choir music. “It wasn’t planned, it just happened,” Brown says of the band’s sound. “I guess it’s just hard to define.”

Music fans will be able to decide for themselves on Saturday, June 9 as Gilliver performs as part of the Tenth Annual Peterborough Thing in the Spring, a five-day arts and music festival. Gilliver will perform at Harlow’s Pub (3 School Street) at 9:30 p.m. The band, which consists of Brown, her brother Dylan Brown, and Mia Govoni, is working on its first album, and have already released two tracks to BandCamp.com.

“I’ve been a musician since I was a kid,” Brown says. “In high school, I decided I was going to be an angry chick with a guitar. Then I got into Celtic music. And jazz. After ten years, I had all this material, but had nowhere to go with it.”

Enter Mia, not just the band’s drummer, but an audio engineer and producer.
“She saw some of my music online and wanted to get something down,” Brown says. “And my brother, who is also a musician, has always encouraged me, so we brought him in, and tada!”

Gilliver was born. The name, according to Brown, is a forgotten word for wall flower. “That’s how I feel most of the time, a sideline observer,” says Brown. “My life and my writing are observational, and has to do with plants!”

Actually, the music benefits a great deal not just from Brown’s work as a landscaper, but from the fact that she worked on a farm for a time. New Hampshire itself is an influence. “I sing a lot about day-to-day life, and that’s New Hampshire because that’s where I’m at,” she says. “Stone is a theme; it’s always in my background. I think about it a lot when I write.”

The band’s first album, which is still in the mixing phase, will be called Tooth in the Tilth, and is named after the first time Brown attempted to plow a field. “I messed it up real bad,” she says.

But in the end, the music of Gilliver is as laid back as the band’s musicians. “Listen, I’m a farmer, I went to school for farming,” Brown says. “There’s just something about the rhythm of the day, taking care of the animals, and sitting on the porch for an hour and writing a song.”

Want to hear what’s on Brown’s Spotify playlist and other artists we’ve featured at Take? Check out our Take a Listen Spotify channel.

Molly Brown–founding musician of Gilliver
Peterborough, New Hampshire
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Top image Molly Brown and Mia Govoni, courtesy of Molly Brown

The post From Farm to Music appeared first on Take Magazine.

When a well-known local New Hampshire director approached seamstress Mary Selvoski about refitting a dozen costumes for an 1800s version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the master seamstress didn’t hesitate. “He gave me two weeks,” she says and shrugs. “I’ve had tighter deadlines.”

It’s Monday morning when I catch up to Selvoski at her shop, Mary’s Closet, in an old warehouse called the Varick Building in the Millyard of Manchester, New Hampshire. Selvoski is cutting and restitching what to my eye just looks like an old blanket. But then she drapes her work over a nearby mannequin and the blanket is reborn as a flowing cloak. “It’s a spirit,” she says proudly. “There’s a few of those in The Tempest.”

If you have gone to a production of community theater anywhere in New Hampshire in the last four decades, odds are you’ve seen Selvoski’s work. Since 1980, the Granite State’s seamstress to the New Hampshire stars has been outfitting community theater groups, providing costumes from scratch or refitting outfits to meet the production’s needs. Taking a quick walk through her vast storage space, even the least theatrically savvy can identify the vast reach of her work. There’s a whole row of princess and queen outfits, from several copies of Beauty’s iconic yellow and blue gown to Glinda the Good Witch’s pink wings and high crown. An entire row is devoted to vests for men and another for Santa suits. There’s a shoe room and a hat room. And high up on the top shelf near the ceiling hangs an enormous Hello Kitty head. “My daughter made that,” Selvoski says. “She did a good job, don’t you think?”

In early 2016, Selvoski sold Mary’s Closet to Seacoast Repertory Theater, a well-known regional outfit based in Portsmouth. Now rechristened “Department M” by Seacoast Rep, Selvoski maintains her own corral of clients and serves as a designer and rental agent for the company. At this point, Selvoski estimates that she has 15,000 costumes in her warehouse.

Mary Selvoski in her workshop, Seaport Repertory Theater

Born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, and raised in Revere, Selvoski got her start in sewing out of stubbornness. She was a tumbler on the gymnastics team in her high school, but disliked her team’s costumes. “So I made new ones,” she says. “I’m very competitive, I look at other people’s work and think that maybe I can do better. That’s what’s kept me going.”

Ironically, it’s this same competitive nature that prevents the seamstress herself from attending the theater. She’s too critical. “I’ve never really been able to get into the show. I’m always looking at bad hemlines,” she says laughing. “Once I saw that an actress had a skirt made of the same material as an actor’s shirt and I thought, What were they thinking!”

Mary Selvoski – Seamstress, Costume Designer
Manchester, New Hampshire
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Top photo courtesy Mary Selvoski

The post Mary Selvoski: Seamstress to the New Hampshire Stars appeared first on Take Magazine.