Trillium Garden on the Greenway Starts Pouring This Week

The pilot beer garden is open Wednesday-Sunday through October.

Pints await at the Trillium Garden on the Greenway

Pints await at the Trillium Garden on the Greenway. / Photo provided by Trillium

Don’t let the gray skies get you down—Boston’s first fully open-air beer garden is so close, we can almost taste it. The Trillium Garden on the Greenway is hosting friends and family this evening, and will start pouring to the public this week, says Trillium cofounder Esther Tetreault.

The partnership between Trillium and the Greenway Conservancy came about in just the last five or so months, after the Greenway sent an unsolicited request for a proposal to Trillium’s main email address, Tetreault says. After four years in Boston, the company is finally working toward opening a full-service brewpub here, but Trillium jumped at the opportunity to share beer directly with fans as early as June, she says.

“We get a million emails a day, with any number of awesome, crazy, and/or random opportunities. When we saw this one come through, we were all like, ‘Is this for real?'”

Indeed it is. The beer garden is among several initiatives—zipline ride, anyone?—that the Greenway Conservancy is taking to make the park appeal to new audiences, executive director Jesse Brackenbury has said.

And Trillium had to work quickly to make it happen. Tetreault says the team had just about a month from when they were awarded this summer’s contract to get it up and running.

“One of the reasons we were able to pull this off is that we have an incredible team at Trillium now,” she says.

Trillium hired 13 new people and promoted from within to design, develop, and staff the beer garden (and their other, ongoing projects). They worked with an architect to build the rustic fencing the surrounds the 4,000-square foot pavilion and install the lighting, and had a custom draft trailer built.

Located on a brick patio directly across from the Rowes Wharf arch, the Trillium Garden on the Greenway is a family-friendly spot with a combination of picnic-style tables, benches, and high tops, plus barrels set up as standing areas. Tetreault says tonight’s soft opening will help them fully determine the capacity, but she expects about 250 people can comfortably hang out at a time. Guests will order and pay directly from the draft trailer; the truck has taps on both sides, Tetreault explains.

The Garden will have eight, rotating beers, three Westport Rivers wines on tap, and a spigot for water. This is the first time Westport Rivers—a longtime favorite of the Tetreaults, who were engaged at the vineyard— has ever kegged their wines, Tetreault says.

To start, there is Westport’s sparkling Farmers Fizz, a dry white, and a dark rosé; plus Trillium Tiny Chicken pale ale, Motueka Free Rise (a dry-hopped saison), double dry-hopped Stillings Street IPA, Coffee Pot & Kettle, and more.

“It will always be a pretty diverse list like what you expect when you go to our Trillium taproom,” Tetrault says. “You can expect pale ales, IPAs, double IPAs, wilds, dark beers, and farmhouse styles at anytime.”

It won’t have its own food menu, but guests will be welcome to bring in food, including from the food trucks parked nearby. Stay tuned to the Garden’s social media for official opening details; once it gets going, it will be open Wednesday-Friday from 4-10 p.m., and Saturdays and Sundays from 11 a.m.-10 p.m.

The pilot beer garden program is currently slated to run through October.