H is for Harpoon

After Sage told me that her "G" activity was going to the zoo, I knew right away that I could turn around my "H" activity right away. My plan all along was to head to the Harpoon Brewery in the seaport area of Boston, and considering this was only a couple miles from the Franklin Park Zoo, why not hit it on the way home? I did a quick search on their website and it showed "special holiday hours" for the week between Christmas and New Years. Excellent! We could stop by, go on a tour, stop for lunch at a seaport establishment, and have a great day.

Harpoon has always been one of my favorite beers. The first time I heard of it was in 1994, when my friend Adam (whom I worked with at Rivco) said we should head down to Boston to their Oktoberfest one weekend afternoon. He also said that since the Grateful Dead were playing the Garden that night, we should head down, go to the party on the seaport, then grab some tickets for the show. Sure, I thought. Why not? So we went to the Oktoberfest party, which was fun -- plenty of beer, Oom-Pah bands, and beer. After drinking our fill and singing "Eins, Zwei, Zuffa!" more times than I care to remember, we headed over to the old Boston Garden to get tickets to the show. Of course the scalpers were charging exorbitantly expensive rates, so I cursed Adam and we headed back to Concord, depressed and tired.

That story really has nothing to do with the "H" activity, except to say that was the last time I had been to the Harpoon corporate offices until yesterday afternoon. We parked on the street and the 2 block walk to Harpoon felt like 2 miles considering the cold weather and wind chill coming off the harbor. We walked into the Brewery Store and I asked when the next tour would be. "We only do tours on the weekend". WHAT? I had looked online, they said they were open this week! Unfortunately they had no tours and were only doing tastings. Oh, when's the next tasting? 4:00 pm, he said. (It was only Noon at this time.) Well, that didn't really work out so well. The man behind the counter did say we could head into the brewery and look around if we wanted, but we couldn't really go that far. So that's what we did.

Sage reads the information boards. Note the red tape to keep us from straying.

Large vats of hoppy goodness.

After looking at the brewery as long as we possibly could (about 5 minutes), we headed back into the brewery store to see what else we could do. Harpoon sells growlers at their brewery, and I figured I'd get one or two. The man behind the counter stepped behind the taps in their tasting room and asked if we wanted to taste anything. Of course! I guess we were too early for their "official" tasting, but he let us taste any beer we wanted. They had some of their Leviathan beers on tap, which are "big beers for the adventurous palate". They had an Imperial IPA on tap, which not only tasted great but has an alcohol content of 9.5%. I grabbed one growler of the Imperial, and one of their traditional IPA.

Doug waits for his growlers to be filled. (He was NOT buying all the growlers pictured here. Though he wanted to.)

(An interesting note about Harpoon's IPA. If you go to any bar in or around Boston, all you have to order is "IPA", and you'll get Harpoon. That's how highly regarded the brew is in the Bay State.)

After getting my growler filled, Sage purchased a German-style beer stein, and I grabbed a tasting glass for my shot glass collection, we headed out with our purchases. After dropping them off at the car, we stopped by the Atlantic Beer Garden for lunch. On the way back to the car we walked by the Boston Fish Pier, the oldest continuously working fish pier in the country. Quite a few boats were pulled up, unloading their catch, but it was too cold to dawdle, so we headed back to the car and the trip back to Natick.

Next up: Sage comes up with an "I" activity. I'm guessing it'll have something to do with Ice, Ice Hockey, or Ice Skating. Only time will tell.