If you are a beer drinker in Boston, than there is a good chance that you know the story of Boston Beer Company’s founder Jim Koch selling the Samuel Adams Boston Lager out of the back of his station wagon in the mid-eighties. Or maybe of the story about Harpoon—then known as Mass Bay Brewing Co.—receiving Massachusetts brewery license #001 in 1986, making it the first brewery to commercially brew and bottle beer in Boston in more than 25 years.
But what you might not know is what else was brewing in Boston back then beyond Sam Adams and Harpoon—the revolutionary brewpubs, Charlestown’s own punk rock brewery, the breweries that closed too soon, their brewhouse gutted and auctioned off to the public.
And of course, the brewers who grew up in the scene and shaped it into what it is today.
“There were a lot of the people in that era who were so integral in building the Boston beer scene, and [brewers today] are stepping on the backs of people who built the foundation,” says Chris Lohring, of the session beer brand Notch Brewing, who founded Tremont Brewery, a British and cask-ale focused brewery in Charlestown in 1993 with his partner Alex Reveliotty.
Darryl Goss, head brewer at Cambridge Brewing Company from 1990 to 1997, is credited with brewing the first commercially produced Belgian-style beer (Tripel Threat) by an American brewery. Tod Mott, notable head brewer at Portsmouth Brewery for eight years, who is now opening a brewery in Southern Maine, brewed at Harpoon, Back Bay Brewing Co. on Boylston, where Forum is now, and at Commonwealth Fish & Beer Co., the first brewpub East of the Mississippi.
“It literally gave me my roots,” says Mott of his time brewing in Boston.
“That’s where I got my education. I learned how to make good beer. How to toe the line.”
Mott got his start at Harpoon in 1991 as a brewer’s helping hand—literally. He got a call from Harpoon co-founder Rich Doyle when his head brewer lopped part of his finger off while filling kegs. Among Mott’s lasting legacy there was the original recipe for Harpoon IPA.
Dann Paquette, of Pretty Things Beer & Ale Project, began his brewing career in the early ’90s in Boston, moving between various breweries and brewpubs. His biggest break came as head brewer at North East Brewing Co., a brewpub in Allston where Joshua Tree is now, where they practiced radical brewing techniques for the time—like using more than one yeast strain in the brewery.
“We were ambitious because we could be, not that it was a success. It wasn’t because it made us really popular. We were one of the first people making sour beer there, aged in wood, and most people hated it,” Paquette says of North East.
Unlike today’s adventurous beer consumers, many of who proudly call themselves “beer geeks,” breweries had to fight for the attention of drinkers and to educate them about their beer.
“Tremont was the first to do cask beer on a distributed basis. We set up the first cask engines in Boston and Cambridge,” says Lohring. “It doesn’t sound like a lot, but you were educating people what craft beer was.”
While there was curiosity in craft beer, or “microbrew,” as it was called then, the consumers’ interest was fleeting,
moving on to the next thing, like hard cider or the rise of the “pre-cocktail scene,” of appletinis and cosmos. Sales waned, and many brewpub and brewery owners shut their doors. North East closed on New Year’s Day 2002; the local chain of Brew Moon brewpubs filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and was sold to Rock Bottom in 2002; the Tremont Brewery shut down in 2001, transferred production to Shipyard in 2002, and sold the brand in 2004.
After the boom, came the bust, and it would be a little while longer until craft beer picked up momentum again, thanks to breweries like Dogfish Head and Stone.
“It was only a few years between when things were bad and the whole new wave, but the new wave is completely disconnected,” says Paquette. “If you made beer prior to Beer Advocate, it was antediluvian, unrecorded beer history. There were so many breweries that we lost.”
While the history may be relatively unrecorded, the influence of the brewers and the beers they made is not.
Next time you drink a Harpoon IPA, or a Belgian-style beer, or a local cask beer, raise it up to the brewers, breweries, and beers that brewed the way for the Boston beer scene of today.
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