Harpoon Brewery, est. 1986
“I want the white UFO,” said someone in the crowd. Suddenly, everybody is asking for a taste of the orange flavored beer.
Carla Ricci one of the tour guides from Harpoon quickly pours glass after glass of the citric tasting beer. “The white UFO is one of the visitors’ favorites,” she says after the one-hour tour in the Harpoon Boston Brewery ended. The predilection for the hefeweizen beer makes sense if one takes into consideration that Harpoon’s main philosophy, as described by its owners, is making “fun beer.”
Like many brewery stories in Massachusetts, Harpoon was born in college, Harvard to be exact, where classmates Rich Doyle and Dan Kenary met.
After traveling through Europe the two beer aficionados decided to start a brewing company that manufactured the type of beer that they enjoyed drinking, but that they could not find in the United States. In order to do that, they decided to team up with a third investor, George Ligetti, and start the first certified brewing operation in Massachusetts in 25 years in 1986. Today, this makes them the oldest brewery in the state.
What started as a small company located at 306 Northen Avenue in Boston, is now the ninth largest craft brewery in the United States, according to the Brewers association last raking. The company owns breweries both in Boston and Vermont and as of 2006 they were reported to produce 100.000 barrels of beer, an important amount of beer when taking into consideration that Harpoon is a microbrewery.
Currently they are brewing five days a week, 24 hours a day, to produce six year-round beers, the UFO line, the Leviathan line, a cider, a 100 years line, and a brewers line. The company is aiming to increase its operations to seven days a week in the near future.
Harpoon’s first beer, the Harpoon Ale, is still on the market. The Winter Warmer, a cinnamon and nutmeg spiced beer that was the first of its kind in New England, is too. “You guys have to come here during the holydays when we are brewing the spiced beers, it just smells like Christmas,” Ricci said in the brewing room where all the silver tanks are lined up one next to each other. But in May there is no cinnamon in the air, instead the smell of hops meets the visitors as they come to the brewery from the States and abroad to taste some beer.
“I came because for only five dollars you get to taste different kinds of beers and learn more about the process,” said Andrea Clark, one of the visitors. “It’s a fun experience and everyone recommended it to me.”
Just like Clark, hundreds of people visit the brewery every week. Harpoon offers tours every day of the week, from noon to six in the evening. They are also open on weekends. “Usually on weekends we are packed with people taking the tour. We start one every half a hour and we move close to 25 people each time,” said Ricci.
Building a relationship with the clients through the tours and events is another of the company’s goals that also offers activities such as the Harpoon Oktoberfest race, Harpoon Fest, and the year-round tastings. Hundreds of people take part in those events each year helping to uphold a reputation for the company that was born out of the idea of having fun.
