Harpoon Brewery in Boston, MA
I may be a government bureaucrat by day, but I’m really a wild and crazy person. Sometimes I ride my bike to faraway places like Virginia. Sometimes I play my music so loud I think my neighbors could hear it if they pressed their ears to the wall. And sometimes I try new things (within reason, obviously).
It's decent.
This week’s new thing was a four-pack from Harpoon’s Leviathan series, a group of “big” beers that are supposed to remind you that Harpoon is a decent craft brewery, not a commercial house of boring-ness.
But because I’m so unpredictably wild, there’s a twist. When I tried to grab the Imperial Red Ale off the shelf at Whole Foods, I accidentally grabbed the Big Bohemian Pilsner instead.
Bad mistake.
Unlike the discovery of penicillin, this was not one of those mishaps that was actually a discovery in disguise. Turns out, a pilsner doesn’t retain many of the crisp, floral characteristics that define the style if you double the ingredients to pump up the ABV. Instead, it just tastes like a sweet, over-malty beer someone should have tasted before bottling — that way the person could maybe salvage the beer with some aggressive dry-hopping. (I’d volunteer for the job, but I already have a perfectly mundane job I like. Matt might be interested, though.)
To be fair, Harpoon’s Big Bohemian Pilsner isn’t awful. It’s decent, and at 9 percent ABV, it was certainly worth the $10 I paid for it.
In retrospect, though, maybe I should have used my $10 to buy something boring but familiar.
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