![]() ![]() The system is very finicky, and at first if the brewers did anything wrong, "wort would go rocketing up the stack," Schier told us. None of this is all that important-most large breweries have advanced tech-but I bring it up entirely as a pretext to tell the following story. (If you want to go deep into the weeds, here's a technical paper for more.) The idea is to reduce pressure so the wort boils at 216 degrees, shortening the boil time and reducing boil-off loss. ![]() Purchased from Huppmann in 2001, it was a state-of-the art system for its time and has not a kettle but a "dynamic low pressure boiling" system. The success of IPA led to the current brewery, which Schier led Sally and me through. (The results, as Jaime Schier relayed the story, were mixed.) There was a diner across the street from the brewery, and Mott struck a deal with them to toast the malt in their oven during off-hours. As a desperate measure, he started sending regular pale malt home with twenty employees, telling them to toast it in their ovens. Mott was trying to produce a warm, biscuity flavor, but couldn't find the malts to do it. Harpoon's early beers looked toward London, and the IPA he create bears those hallmarks. But in the early 90s, he was getting his start as a brewer and was trying to figure out the grist for the brewery's IPA. The original recipe was designed by Tod Mott, a legendary New England brewer who would go on to Portsmouth Brewing and make Kate the Great Imperial Stout, finally founding his own brewery in Kittery, Maine. The change in fortunes came when they introduced IPA in 1993. Kenary continued to work for a bank for years after the brewery was founded, and despite decent sales, it still wasn't profitable. (It was called Harpoon Ale, which isn't as boring as it sounds the brewery's actual name is the Massachusetts Bay Brewing Company-like BridgePort and Pyramid, the name we know it by came from early beers.) They never planned to grow very fast, and indeed have never grown faster than 11% a year. Since none of the founders knew how to brew beer, they hired a recent UC-Davis graduate named Russ Heissner, and brought him to make a beer inspired by English mild ale. ![]() The original brewery was a 20 barrel kit, and Harpoon managed to sell an impressive 1,500 barrels its first year. I was interested to see the brewery, hear how what course they have charted for the future, and see some of those big tanks. But it has also meant Harpoon is strongly identified with its flagship and has a staid, traditional quality about it-something like a cask ale brewery amid the hip startups in London. The absence of much competition allowed Harpoon to become one of the country's most successful breweries, and Harpoon IPA is ubiquitous throughout the city. That left Harpoon with the run of the city until recently, when a whole raft of smaller breweries have come along to spark a beer geek renaissance there (Trillium and Tree House, in nearby Charlton, are both on short lists of the hottest breweries in the country). Sam Adams had its HQ there, but made an oddly out-of-step amber lager that was not to New England's burgeoning ale-oriented tastes. ![]() For most of the craft era, Boston was an also-ran in beer. Harpoon has an interesting reputation right now. When I visited, I started by chatting with Dan Kenary (who's also CEO)-look for the audio to appear on a future podcast-and then joined Jaime Schier, a brewer whose current title is Director of Quality, for a tour. The city owns the land, but they are happy to have a working plant like Harpoon there in 2008 they signed a lease with the brewery to keep Harpoon there through 2058. There are still a couple heavy beams running parallel to the canning and kegging lines that have rails on top of them that were used by the shipbuilders. The warehouse Harpoon found back in 1986 was originally used in the 1930s to build destroyers for the British navy-until December 1941, after which the ships went to the United States. And by city brewery I mean, of course, Harpoon-not that other one that has "Boston" in the title but which has never been brewed in Red Sox nation.Īlthough a lot has changed since the body-dumping days, the location is still by no means a glamorous one: it's the working harbor. Last week, while in Boston to give a speech, I carved out time to visit the old city brewery down on the harborside where, as founder Dan Kenary joked, "Whitey Bulger used to dump bodies." Now the 27th largest brewery in the country, it has been at that location for thirty-one years. Little breweries have their own delights, but there's something about the scale, the thump and clang of large breweries, that I can't resist. Big tanks, big pipes, big packaging floors. ![]()
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