History

1986: The Beginning… 

It all started with three college buddies and a shared love of beer.  Dan Kenary, Rich Doyle, and George Ligeti were passionate about beer, but they weren’t able find what they were looking for on tap at their local pubs.  While traveling in Europe after college, they drank many diverse, fresh, local beers and experienced firsthand the wonderful beer culture that existed just across the pond.

They wanted to bring that to Boston, so they decided to do just that. In 1986 the Harpoon Brewery received Brewing Permit #001 in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
And that, friends, was the beginning of Harpoon….

We had the building, brewing equipment, and a bunch of people who loved to drink beer….now we just needed someone to come and actually brew the beer. Enter Russ Heissner, a graduate of the UC Davis School of Fermentation Sciences. Russ started formulating the recipe for Harpoon Ale in the summer of 1986.  Friends and family were the lucky (and, at times, unlucky) quality control team through many months of test batches.  Finally, in June of 1987 the “original” Harpoon Ale was brewed and delivered to Harpoon’s first accounts; the Sevens Ale House on Charles Street and Doyle’s Café in Jamaica Plain. And the rest, as they say, is history. But read on for more anyway.

1993 – 2000: Harpoon IPA is Created and We Buy a Brewery

It’s hard to believe these days, but back in the early 90s, IPAs weren’t as ubiquitous as they are now. In fact, there were very few brewed on the east coast. In the early 1990s, hoppy Pale Ales were being brewed in the Pacific Northwest and California but there were no craft beers being brewed in the rest of the US that featured high aroma content from Northwest hops. Harpoon IPA was a very extreme beer for 1993. Would beer drinkers be ready for the hoppiness of an IPA? ….YES.  Instead of shying away from the hops, beer drinkers embraced them. Our IPA quickly became our bestselling beer and flagship. It made the brewery it is today.

Then in 2000, we purchased the former Catamount Brewery in Windsor, VT. The craft beer fire was catching, and we continued to grow at a rapid pace. Our digs in Boston could no longer accommodate the insatiable thirst of New England beer lovers. We were brewing at full capacity at our facility in Boston – 24 hours a day, seven days a week – but we continued to struggle to keep up with the demand for Harpoon.  As luck would have it, an incredible opportunity came our way – a beautifully constructed relatively new brewery built by the Catamount Brewery, another pioneering New England craft brewer, went up for sale.  In June of 2000 we became the proud owners of a new, state-of-the-art brewery in Windsor, Vermont. We still brew some of the Catamount beers from time to time – be sure to follow us on social to learn more about these special releases!

2014: We Become Employee Owned!

Some people think we walk around Harpoon like we own the place. Well, that could be because we actually DO own the place. In July 2014, Harpoon became an employee owned company, with 48% of the company given to employees through the establishment of an ESOP. An E-what? ESOP stands for Employee Stock Ownership Plan. It is a mechanism by which a company contributes to its employees’ retirement by allocating shares to them which it repurchases…..yadda, yadda, yadda… Here’s what it means: we are employee owned, we are an independent craft brewer, and you bet we’re damn proud of it.