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.