Boston steeped in beer-brewing history

The Samuel Adams tour highlights the area where 31 breweries once operated.
BOSTON (AP) -- The Boston of a century ago was a beer-brewing hub to rival Midwestern suds capitals such as Milwaukee, St. Louis and Chicago. Research by local historians has turned up evidence of 31 operating breweries inside the city limits in the late 19th century. A city better known for its baked beans and clam chowder had the greatest number of breweries per capita at the time, said Michael Reiskind, a Boston historian who has researched Boston's brewing history.
But few visible reminders of the industry remain -- except a two-decades-old beer named after one of the city's fieriest Revolutionary War patriots. The Samuel Adams Brewery Tour and its Boston Beer Museum as the chief repository of the city's brewing history -- a place to learn about the past and toast the legacy by downing some sample Sam Adams varieties.
"There are empty remnants, and some old warehouses left behind, but nothing else really interesting like the Sam Adams Brewery to walk around and really get a feel for what it was like," Reiskind said.
Brewery revival
Modern Boston brewers like Sam Adams, founded in 1984, and more recent arrivals including the Harpoon Brewery and Tremont Ale in nearby Waltham "brought back a whole local industry of brewing" that began to die out during Prohibition and the subsequent consolidation in the U.S. brewing industry, Reiskind said.
The Sam Adams tour, which is free with a $2 donation to charity encouraged, promotes the city's best-known contemporary beer brand. It also recaptures some of the city's brewing past through historical displays, memorabilia, and even a 30-foot-long glass-lined brewing tank that has been cut open and placed on its side to walk through.
Included is a section on Sam Adams, who brewed beer for a time before fueling some of the political ferment that preceded the Revolutionary War. Jim Koch, a sixth-generation brewer whose family has brewing roots in St. Louis and Cincinnati, borrowed the Sam Adams name when he worked off an old family recipe to create his modern brew.
One of the first major Boston breweries was the Boston Beer Co., a defunct brand chartered in 1828 that now is the namesake of the corporate entity behind Sam Adams Beer.
The company develops new brews at the Sam Adams Brewery but brews most of its product elsewhere.
The brewery is in Boston's Jamaica Plain section, which, along with neighboring Roxbury, was home to about three-quarters of Boston's breweries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The brewers were drawn to the then-inexpensive land in the Stony Brook Valley and also to the Stony Brook Aquifer, which no longer boasts the pure water of a century ago.
Hidden now
Most of the old brewery structures still standing have been turned into warehouses and storage, and they're hard to find tucked away amid a maze of narrow streets once populated mostly by immigrants from countries like Germany and Ireland. The German legacy is easy to see in Jamaica Plain's streets, which bear names such as Beethoven and Bismarck.
Irish and English immigrants produced hearty ales in Boston, while Germans favored lagers, Reiskind said. Some of the brews shared partnerships with Boston's professional baseball teams, such as the Burkhard Brewery's Red Sox Beer and Pennant Ale.
The Pfaff brewing family cut a deal with the former Boston Braves, Reiskind said.
Prohibition forced many of the breweries to either shut down or convert to other products like soft drinks. By the time the ban on alcohol consumption was lifted in 1933, many small breweries were unable to survive as industry consolidation took hold, Reiskind said.
At 30 Germania St. stands the Samuel Adams Brewery, which occupies several structures in a complex of two dozen buildings dating to the 1870s that once housed the Haffenreffer Brewery.
The Haffenreffer was the last of the old Boston breweries to shut down when it ceased operations in the 1960s, two decades before Koch set up shop there and reinvigorated the local industry.
Sam Adams beer fans come from far and wide to take the brewery tour, which Koch figures has drawn as many as 300,000 visitors since 1988.
They come even though the brewery is hard to find and the tours are offered just six times a week most of the year.
"To me, they're pilgrims," Koch said. "If they find their way here, we want them to have a good experience, learn something and enjoy some great beer."
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