BOSTON—The Harpoon Brewery is proud to bring back Grateful Harvest Ale, a New England cranberry ale brewed in the Thanksgiving spirit of giving back to the community.  For every 6-pack of Grateful Ale sold, the Harpoon Brewery will make a $1 donation to the local food bank in the area in which the beer was purchased.

Harpoon Grateful Harvest Ale is a beer brewed with Thanksgiving celebrations in mind.  Freshly harvested cranberries, donated by local cranberry farm A.D. Makepeace, lend a subtle tartness to the beer.  The cranberry flavor complements the malty character derived by the combination of Munich and Vienna malts. Additions of CaraMunich and Dehusked Carafa III malts enhances the beer’s reddish hue and adds a touch of sweetness, while Northern Brewer bittering hops complement the slight cranberry tartness.  A traditional top fermenting strain of ale yeast was used to showcase the malt profile and accent the fresh cranberry aroma.  The result is a medium-bodied, malty and mildly sweet amber ale with a bready aroma and a subtle cranberry flavor.

The idea for Harpoon Grateful Harvest Ale was born out of the relationships the brewery has cultivated with New England food banks throughout the years.  This beer will help raise desperately needed funds for the fight against hunger, with $1 from every 6-pack sold going to the local food bank in the area in which it was purchased. Since the beer was first released in 2010, Harpoon has donated more than $84,000 to local food banks from the sales of Grateful Harvest alone. A blog post about the beer can be found here:  http://www.harpoonbrewery.com/blog/2338/Grateful-Harvest-is-Here.

Harpoon Grateful Harvest Ale will be available on tap at the brewery’s Boston, MA and Windsor, VT facilities.  For every pint of Grateful Harvest sold at the breweries, Harpoon will make a $1 donation to their local food bank. In addition, a special pumpkin spice pretzel will be sold at the Harpoon Beer Hall in Boston, with $1 for each pretzel sold going to the local food bank.

On Sunday, November 10th, Harpoon will host the Harpoon Helps Grateful Harvest Dinner at their beer hall in Boston.  It will be a twist on the traditional Thanksgiving meal, with recipes for each dish developed by Harpoon employees.  100% of ticket sales will be donated to the Greater Boston Food Bank.

Harpoon was founded on two principles: to make great beer and to be good neighbors within their community.  Since the brewery bottled its first beer in 1986, Harpoon has endeavored to make meaningful contributions to causes that are important to them and their customers.  What started as beer donations here and there, hosting fundraisers for friends from time to time, and producing small fundraisers, has developed into one of the brewery’s most cherished programs: Harpoon Helps.  So far in 2013 alone, the Harpoon Helps program has raised more than $445,000 for local charities, donated more than 50,000 pints toward local charity events with approximately 300 local non-profits supported, and has performed thousands of volunteer hours at local organizations.

Harpoon Grateful Harvest Ale Specs:
Style:  Cranberry Amber Ale
OG:     15.5
ABV:    5.8%
IBUs:   30
Pairing Suggestion: Turkey with all the fixings

Harpoon Grateful Harvest Ale will be available in bottles from early October through early December.  This beer is an ideal beer for the Thanksgiving season.

About the Harpoon Brewery
The Harpoon Brewery was founded by beers lovers, Rich Doyle and Dan Kenary.  In 1986 Harpoon was issued Brewing Permit #001 by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, since it was the first brewery to brew commercially in Boston after a dormant period of about 25 years.  Harpoon’s line of craft beer features its award-winning IPA and UFO Hefeweizen beers, along with four special seasonal selections. In 2000 Harpoon purchased a second brewery in Windsor, VT, making Harpoon the 9th largest craft brewer in the US.  Harpoon has since introduced a line of limited edition beers, the 100 Barrel Series, the Leviathan Imperial IPA, as well as the all-natural Harpoon Cider made from freshly pressed, local apples.  For more information about Harpoon beers and visiting the breweries, visit www.harpoonbrewery.com.

Harpoon Brewery

Boston

Style: Rye IPA

ABV: 6.9%

Review: Named for founders Rich Doyle and Dan Kenary—and sporting a picture of them in their younger days—the Rye IPA is a bit darker than the brewery’s flagship Harpoon IPA, with a highly complicated nose. Maybe orange? Maybe biscuit. Very big aroma with a matching large mouthfeel. True to style, it finishes with a delightful tartness, making it a great introduction into the world of rye.

Harpoon Brewery

Boston

Style: White IPA

ABV: 6.2%

Review: White IPAs have a heavy responsibility to deliver. This one brings its game. Hazy with hints of orange and lemon in the nose.  It drinks very soft and has a certain comfortable mildness, finishing with a bit of spice sitting on top of some hoppy fruitiness.

Harpoon Brewery

Boston

Style: Imperial IPA

ABV: 10%

Review: The Leviathan series from Harpoon has always delivered incredibly complex profiles—big and robust. This monster IPA is true to its family. Hazy (as is often the case with imperial IPAs), the Leviathan throws off an orange and lemon fruity nose. It shows a bright golden amber and drinks very deceptively mild with a rich body. The spice and fruit in the finish sits on top of a caramel richness and a hint of alcohol burn.

Harpoon Brewery

Boston

Style: IPA

ABV: 5.9%

Review: A 20-year-old classic, Harpoon IPA pours with a decided commitment to malt. Could we say it’s the Northeast version of IPAs?  Beautifully golden in color. A lot of malt also shows up in the finish. Definitely not a West Coast fruit bomb. Very piney in the finish, giving it the sense of English hops. It has an amazingly light mouthfeel for an IPA, making it ridiculously refreshing.

The beer community in Boston rallied to support victims of the bombings at the finish line of the Boston Marathon on April 15. Photo by Mike Johnson.

By Heather Vandenengel

It did not take long for the New England beer community to join together and rally support for victims, friends, families and the Boston community after the bombings at the finish line of the Boston Marathon on April 15.

The morning after the attacks, which killed three and injured more than 250, the Craft Beer Cellar in Belmont, MA, announced that it was donating more than $1,700 to the victims and the families of the bombings; it had originally raised the money to help launch the new location for a beer store in Winchester, MA.

Meanwhile, David Carlson, owner of Marshall Wharf Brewing Co. in Belfast, ME, posted a thread on a BeerAdvocate forum saying he wanted to “help heal Boston with beer.” With help from Framingham, MA-based lager brewery Jack’s Abby, he held an event at a Framingham bar one day later featuring beer donated from 25 breweries and a raffle with prizes donated from local beer stores and beer geeks. The event raised almost $9,000 for The One Fund Boston, established to help those most affected by the attacks.

For the second year, marathon sponsor Boston Beer Co. released Sam Adams 26.2 Brew, a limited-edition gose brewed for the marathon and sold at bars along the marathon route and around Boston. This year, it donated all profits from the sales of the beer, as well as donations accepted from visitors who toured the brewery in April, to the Greg Hill Foundation, which responds to immediate needs of families affected by tragedy.

There are many more of these stories: Mystic Brewery in Chelsea, MA, donated sales from the tasting room release of its 14-month barrel-aged flor-sherry yeast-fermented ale, Entropy; Night Shift Brewing in Everett raised over $1,200 with sales from the taproom-exclusive release of its Berliner Weisse-style beer, Ever Weisse; Harpoon Brewery announced three “Brewed for Boston” nights, where all beer and pretzel sales at its beer hall would be donated to The One Fund.

So what about water?

Though less acknowledged today, since brewers can effectively alter it to suit their needs (more on that later), water is, in fact, primarily responsible for the development of the pantheon of classic beers. “It is really interesting to look at the variety of styles that popped up in different parts of the world and became popular and good because of the water they had available to them,” notes Harpoon Brewing’s vice president chief brewing officer, Al Marzi. “The ingredients were all the same, except for the water, and you’ve got completely different beers being made.”

The basic recipe has always been water, malt, hops and yeast. So, why did the darker beers develop in Munich and Dublin, the hoppy pale ales in Burton, England, the pilsners in Plzen? As Olympia Brewing Co. founder Leopold Schmidt, so astutely proclaimed at the turn of the 19th century, it’s the water.

The True Connection Between Hard Rock and Beer

Water is the medium in which all the magic in the brewing process happens. And as innocuous as it seems—it’s clear and, for the most part, tasteless—it’s not all the same. You may have actually noticed when traveling that the water in, say, Portland, OR, may smell (or even taste) a little different from the H2O that comes out of your own tap at home. You may even have to use more soap or shampoo to get a good lather depending on what the water is like. This is what’s referred to as water hardness. And this, specifically, is what’s responsible for the development of different beer styles.

The chemistry of turning malted grains, yeast, hops and water into a delicious, refreshing alcoholic beverage, is relatively straight forward: grains are transformed into starches that, with the help of water and heat, the yeast can consume and turn into alcohol. But a little something called “water hardness” complicates things. “Hardness is mainly due either to lots of calcium and magnesium in the water, so-called ‘permanent’ hardness, as it’s relatively difficult to get rid of,” explains Professor Alex Maltman of the Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences at Aberystwyth University in Wales, “or bicarbonate in the water, ‘temporary’ hardness, which can be precipitated out by boiling.

“There’s a whole range of taste effects [in brewing] that arise from the presence of these substances, such as calcium promoting the bittering contribution of hops, and magnesium enhancing beer flavor, like salt in food. But the main effect—certainly of bicarbonate—is to affect the pH, or acidity, of the liquid during brewing.”

Yeast, who, let’s face it, do all the heavy lifting in the brewing process, are particular about the environment they work in. So, if the pH is comfortable for them, they can do their job well. Now, before this chemistry was known to brewers, they simply had to adjust their ingredients to suit the water. Bicarbonate-rich water—such as that in Munich and Dublin—creates a high pH (too alkaline for the yeast to do their thing properly). But roast some of the grains nice and dark, and it lowers the pH in the mash; the yeast are happy and they make a tasty dark brew, such as a German dunkel or Irish stout.

We can thank the varied geology of this great blue marble we inhabit for the variety of beers we drink today, because the different dissolved minerals in water—depending on the source—have had a profound effect on the development of brewing beer. “Burton-on–Trent in England has very mineral-rich water, including calcium and magnesium,” says Professor Maltman, “so it produces a strong tasting beer. It is also rich in sulfate, which adds a characteristic flavor and improves stability. This why the style known as English pale ale originated there, and the stability enabled it to travel far in those colonial days, even as far as India, if brewed strongly—hence India pale ale.” A relative lack of dissolved minerals, or “soft” water, such as that in Plzen in the Czech Republic, was key in the development of pilsner.

So, yeah, it’s the water. But, really, it’s what’s in the water. That is to say, those dissolved minerals—calcium, magnesium, sulfates and bicarbonates—are really what affect the pH, taste and stability. Which begs the question, how did they get there and why do some places have more or less? The answer lies in the earth itself. “The chemistry of water is greatly influenced by the geology of the aquifer in which it has resided,” explains Professor Maltman. “As one example, the bedrock below Burton, England, consists of sedimentary strata formed around 250 million years ago—a time when what is now England was closer to the equator and in desert conditions. Saline lakes evaporated to leave the sediments—what is now bedrock—rich in minerals such as gypsum, also known as calcium sulfate, and Epsom salts, also known as magnesium sulfate. Just as they were originally dissolved in the ancient lakes, these minerals now readily dissolve into the local groundwater, which is why Burton brewing water is like it is.”

So one may safely draw the conclusion that since the geology of North America is equally varied, the water is too. True enough, and though it hasn’t exactly given rise to specific beer styles, the water available to brewers here has had a profound effect on them—from San Diego’s challengingly hard water to the surprisingly perfect-for-brewing Brooklyn water. The difference today is that with the advanced understanding of what’s in our H2O—most municipal water suppliers can provide brewers with an analysis of the water makeup—we no longer have to brew beers that suit the particular local hardness. Or as Al Marzi at Harpoon so cleverly puts it, “The brewer’s art can be expanded to create any type of water he’d like to have for a particular style.”