Boston

Coming to you today from our studios at NEPM in Western Mass.

We're here every Saturday on NEPM, GBH News in Boston, and CAI on the Capen Islands.

I'm Jeremy Siegel.

And this week, we're starting off on the Cape with an investigation into a mysterious religious organization that's found itself at the center of a federal lawsuit.

Some folks might remember that from the news.

So this was a huge story at the time.

It was in the Boston Globe.

The Globe wrote about how Aaron had been part of this religious group on Cape Cod where I live and work.

Yeah, so I had been a, a sort of, uh, uh, an expert in these crowdsourcing and citizen detective type people.

I wrote a story about Maura Murray and the citizen detectives trying to find her for Boston Magazine.

Mm-hmm.

I wrote a, I wrote a story for Rolling Stone about the, uh, the citizen detectives trying to track down the kitten killer, Luka Magnotta.

You don't...

As soon as I got the name...

And one of the biggest problems that you see, and we saw this in the Boston Marathon bombing, was-

This is a great point

On today's episode, I welcome on photographer Ken Richardson.

Uh, Ken Richardson is a friend and a local Boston photographer like myself.

Uh, he's worked with clients such as The New York Times, Time Magazine, Popular Science, and many more.

I was excited to get Ken on the podcast.

Excited to have you on.

Uh, I don't know if you feel this way.

Uh, Boston is like a small city and, like, we've known each other for a decade plus now.

Yeah, for sure.

And then, as Sarah said, after someone has looked at that, 24 hours later, it's out of their mind.

Well, I subscribe, I don't know how, because someone sent it to me, to Boston Magazine.

And what they've done is taken all the public schools, and I think some of the private schools in the Boston area, and instead of a letter grade, they say, okay, here's the attendance, here's what percentage take AP courses, here's the student-teacher ratio, here's the percentage who go to college.

And so you just kind of go across, and then they kind of rank them accordingly.

And they also take a look at how much is spent per pupil.

Driven by heavy metal vibes, a diverse tap list, and a relentless hustle to spread the word of craft beer.

Widowmaker rapidly exploded from a local hidden gem into a leader of craft beer in New England, with additional locations now in Boston, Mass., and Quincy, Mass.

Under Ryan's leadership, the brewery's production has gone from 500 barrels a year to roughly 6,000 annually, with weekly special releases backed by core offerings like Rift City Lager, Green Wizard, West Coast IPA, and Blue Comet, the World Beer Cup-winning hazy IPA.

Though he started as the company's sole brewer, today he drives the vision behind Widowmaker's brand development, community outreach, and signature hospitality, while remaining involved in the company's daily production efforts.

So you guys started back in 2017, but when did Widowmaker finally figure out what Widowmaker was?

Yeah.

Uh, so it took a little bit, um, you know, we were, we came up in obviously in the Boston area and, uh, you know, you got long time companies like Harpoon and Boston beer company, Sam Adams.

Um, but like the tap room beer culture wasn't really super, uh, active it was it was a new thing when uh tap rooms started popping up like you know even when uh you know you think of the trilliums and the tree houses uh they didn't have beer they didn't have tap rooms when they first opened and and it wasn't really like uh people didn't really bat an eye about it because they didn't know any different and um we were sort of part of that second wave of of breweries and um we didn't really know what to expect because, you know, it wasn't really part of our like culture around here as far as like beer drinking, you know, we, we had a lot of great beer bars, but people making their beer and buying it at their location wasn't really like super, uh, normal, um, until maybe like 2015, 2016.

Number two, Lawyer Malloy was a friend, a good friend of mine.

Lawyer wrote tech reviews for my friends, free Boston Magazine, and sponsored a party on Lansdowne for the Super Bowl in 2002 that I attended.

Well, there's a lot of detail there that, John, I don't know how fast you can write, but good luck.

Yeah.

I'm going to say the extra detail in number two gives it away.

The lawyer Malloy, the

tech reviews, the Boston Magazine.

It's a lot.