A recent trip to Boston offered me the opportunity to visit Harpoon Brewery. I visited their other brewery in Windsor, Vermont, a few years back and had a good experience, but this tasting left me even more impressed with the quality and range of this craft brewer. As I wandered around the gift shop waiting for the once-daily tasting to start, I was impressed with the significant numbers of customers coming and going to get their growlers filled for the holidays—Harpoon has evidently a good following in Boston. The Boston location makes almost all of the kegged beer (for consumption in the environs of Boston) while the Vermont brewery focuses on the bottled beers.
First up, the widely distributed and widely popular IPA reminded me of Sierra Nevada's pale ale, full flavor with piney hops, a firm flavor profile that is simple and refreshing, if not that exciting for me. The Winter Warmer offered plenty of orange peel and coriander on the nose, but with a touch of holiday spice. Full, rich, delicious, sweet and malty with faded citrus and cloves. Yummy indeed, not sure how much of this I could drink—but on a particularly cold evening (which central Massachusetts has had in spades since I arrived) I imagine I could greatly enjoy more than one. The Munich Dark offers a really nice nose with fill on malt, but balances the sweetness with a bit of tang that really makes this one sessionable—nice. Next, from the 100 Barrel Series which offers Harpoon's brewers the opportunity to experiment with a new recipe for a limited run, was the #29 Ginger Wheat which reminded me, not surprisingly, of pickled ginger. Particularly pickled ginger. Felt like gnoshing on some sushi when I was drinking it—though it was cleansing, I don't think I'd want to sit down and enjoy a whole beer—the flavors are a bit too obvious.
The only beer I tried of the unfiltered offerings was the UFO Hefeweizen—which I've had before and don't really care for. I'm not a hefeweizen fan in general, and this one lacks focus for my preferences. The Chocolate Stout smelled like walking into a Dunkin' Donuts—flavored coffee, sweet, obvious, and a bit overpowering, but pleasant. Much funkier in the taste, lots of unsweetened chocolate flavors, faded, burnt, weird, perhaps still drinkable—a nonbeerlike beer.
Perhaps my favorite of the tasting was the Leviathan Baltic Porter—beautiful dense, dark, with dark raspberry on the nose, superb elegance, a touch of spice—delicious and interesting, fantastic. Intensity defined the Leviathan Imperial IPA with bright caramel, alcohol, fruity intense nose—a high strung beer that achieves a very impressive balance. A slow-drinking beer, but one I'd gladly revisit. Finally, an interesting conversation brought forth a bottle of the Leviathan Quad which has Belgian candy syrup and was bottled in February—clearly the beer has calmed down since then with the sweetness and alcohol ratcheting down enough to make it approachable. Right now the flavors are complex and explosive on the nose, but the palate requires a bit more time to come together and fully express itself there as well. On a future visit, I'll have to pick up a bottle of the Wet Hop series which they sold out of while I was there—hops from upstate New York, and less than a day from harvest to being dumped in the tanks. Overall, a very impressive craft brewer that seems to have a correspondingly enthusiastic following—I hope to visit them again in the future.