The book CRAFTY BASTARDS (Union Park Press) covers the 400-year history of beer making in New England, including a section on Haffenreffer Brewers, written by Robert's friend
Lauren Clark!
Click here to learn more about and buy the book.Read the excerpt below from
Crafty Bastards: Beer in New England from the Mayflower to Modern Day,
by Lauren Clark (Union Park Press)
The most successful New England brewers of the [post-Prohibition] era, or of any era since, were the Haffenreffers. During its hundred years in the brewing business, the family owned not only Haffenreffer & Co. in Boston's Jamaica Plain neighborhood but Old Colony/Enterprise Brewing in Fall River, Massachusetts and the Narragansett Brewing Co. in Cranston, Rhode Island--the most successful New England-based brewery ever.
The man who started it all was Rudolph Haffenreffer, who immigrated to America from Württemburg, Germany in 1868. Already an experienced brewer at age twenty-one, he began working at Gottlieb F. Burkhardt's in Roxbury, one of Boston's first lager breweries. Pure water from the Stonybrook aquifer, along with cheap land, made Roxbury and Jamaica Plain a magnet for brewers, and that area became a hub of New England's small German immigrant population. Rudolph quickly worked his way up to brewmaster and married Catherine Burkhardt, Gottlieb's seventeen-year-old niece.
In 1870, he started the Boylston Brewery on Bismarck and Germania streets in Jamaica Plain, though it was soon thereafter known as Haffenreffer & Co. At first, he brewed only lagers, but in 1901--this being New England, after all--ales and porters joined the portfolio. At that point, the plant had expanded from a modest wooden brewhouse to a mostly brick complex of fourteen buildings including refrigerated storehouses, a stable for horse-drawn delivery wagons, and, according to legend, a beer-dispensing spigot on one outdoor wall.
