Beer in Boston

Jeff and I started watching the TV show Fringe on Netflix. The show is based in Boston, and seeing the landmarks makes me think of our trip to Boston a few years ago.

We saw Boston Common, ate some seafood and visited Harvard and MIT, but because I'm blogging about it, you know we also had some beer.

Actually, we had a lot of beer.

We visited John Harvard's Brewery and Ale House first and discovered a pretty normal brew pub near the Harvard campus. The pub had some regular beers, like their pale ale, but it also boasts a "cookbook" of more than 250 recipes, and specialty taps that change every two weeks.

Samuel Adams is probably the most well-known beer out of Boston. The tour of the brewery is pretty average - you stand in a room and listen to the tour guide, then you move a few feet over to see the brewing area. If you've been on a beer tour before, you won't learn anything new from the tour (unless you want to ask specific Samuel Adams questions).

But it's the final step - the tasting portion of the day - that makes it worth the trip out to this brewery. You will get to try beers you cannot get in Canada. And they're not stingy with the samples, either (just make sure you don't have a neighbour who tries to hog the pitcher). For a $2 suggested donation, it's a good stop.

We went to the Cambridge Brewing Company - which is really just a restaurant. This was my lease favourite stop on the trip (so much so, I didn't even bother to take a picture of the place). But the cool thing here is they use hops they grow on their own patio.

I loved that they gave you paper so you could take notes.

There's more than one, but do stop at a Boston Beer Works. This is very, very important. They have your typical sports bar fare (get the onion rings!), but they also have a lot of beers. There are several locations - we went to the one outside Fenway Park. There are at least 10 beers on tap at any given time and they're all made locally.

Jeff and I had a really good time at this pub and probably could have spent the day there. We tried every beer they had (some more than once) and probably should have gone there for dinner (then taken a cab back to the hotel) instead of going there for lunch and then continuing to be tourists that afternoon - not the easiest when you're a tad tipsy. Or a lot tipsy. Or falling down drunk.

If you have time to stop at only one place though, make it Harpoon Brewery and go for a tour. You will get to try multiple samples during a tour. The "tour" consists of staying in one room, or maybe wandering onto a "deck" where you can overlook the brewery (this may have changed - I have noticed on Harpoon's Twitter account, there have been some renovations at the brewery since we were there in 2010).

We loved Harpoon - these guys knew their beers and enjoyed talking about their beers. When we were there, they had some UFO (unfiltered offerings) along with several seasonal beers we got to try.

The best thing for us about Harpoon - our hotel was a five-minute walk away!

Inside Harpoon - look at all those taps!