Like a Harpoon to the Throat (Part 1)

I love brewery tours. I worked at Sam Adams’s brewery for a while giving tours and tastings in Jamaica Plain, MA. JP is a great neighborhood for a brewery tour because it fulfills one of the requirements that make them great: they have to be in a neighborhood that you would have otherwise no reason to go to.

Harpoon, also in Boston, fulfills that same requirement by being near the harbor in Southie. Despite living in Boston for five years and working at Sam*, I had never been to their brewery tour before last weekend. But, in Boston with Jake and Marta and other assorted close friends, I decided to go.

The tour was fairly standard; a pretty simple whirl around the brewery with plenty of free samples and not too many jokes. Plus some of the server girls were Boston-
hot**, which is more than Sam has going for it.

The best part of any tour is, of course, the free beer they give you. Harpoon starts you off early with a nice Harpoon IPA taste right at the beginning of the tour and then at various spots along the way they refill your glass. It’s a great strategy. Then, at the end of the tour, they give you free rein of their taps for about 30 minutes: as much beer as you can guzzle and get from the tastemasters. This is the second best set-up of its kind I’ve ever seen behind only the Abita brewery, where they put you in a room with a tap and a stack of cups for an hour. I’m not kidding.

Anyway, we got some solid and rare Harpoon brews, including a Rye IPA they were doing as part of their Hundred Barrels Series and a couple of Leviathans. I’ve been a huge fan of that line for a couple years now – they seem to knock all of them out of the park – and it was nice to try some things I hadn’t in a while. Namely the Harpoon Leviathan Uber-Bock (pictured, poorly), which was sweet and comforting and made me want to curl up in a corner of the brewery forever. " />



After seven or nine glasses of these, my friends and I wandered around Boston’s North End before meeting friends in the antiseptic Kendall Square Neighborhood. A good time was had by all.

But then…the following morning...disaster struck. Continued in Part 2.

*Or maybe because of working at Sam. Those two have a weird rivalry that you probably don’t realize unless you work there.

**Boston-hot is when a girl is hot by Boston standards, which…well, I’ll let you puzzle that out.***

***Lest I be accused of being anti-Boston, let me assure you that Boston-hot is way hotter than Philly-hot.