Al Marzi

Eighteen years ago, Al Marzi was hauling kegs for Harpoon. Now, he’s the guy filling those kegs. He’s in charge of two breweries, in Boston and Windsor, Vt. He’s nurturing regional flagship brands and springing one-offs on an expectant populace. And to think—it all started with a useless undergraduate degree.

1. A start at the bottom is still a start
Al Marzi landed at Harpoon in 1991. He’d graduated from Boston University with a communications degree he probably wasn’t going to use, and was drifting around town, playing music, painting houses and homebrewing. A friend hooked him up with an interview with Harpoon co-founder Rich Doyle, who needed a delivery driver. “I said, ‘I’ll be the driver, but can I also be the assistant brewer?’” Marzi recalls. “Rich said, ‘Yeah, fine, you’re the assistant brewer. Now get in the truck.’” The work was backbreaking, but it exposed Marzi to the consumer end of the beer industry. And, more importantly, it paid.

2. Climb the ladder
Marzi spent every spare moment inside the brewery. “I had this voracious appetite to learn as much as I could about the process,” he says. After 10 months in the truck, Doyle brought Marzi into the brewhouse full time, where he learned the craft from Russ Heissner and Tod Mott. “All along the way, my passion for beer kept growing,” he says. That passion propelled the ex-driver from assistant brewer to head brewer to VP of brewing operations to chief brewing officer. The beer he was making, and drinking, was nothing like “the dregs of the dregs” he was used to. “Harpoon Ale was nothing like anything I’d had before. It had color, flavor and character.”

3. Learn why you’re learning
A trip to Siebel followed soon after Marzi’s promotion to head brewer. He feels it’s best to layer scientific education over a base of experience. “If you don’t know how to put a clamp on and you don’t know what’s going on in the mash tun, it isn’t as relevant.” Still, he says, it might’ve been nice if his high school guidance counselor had hinted that beer making is a viable career path. “In high school, I took college chemistry and biology, and I hated those courses. And math! If only they’d said, ‘You can’t brew beer without understanding chemistry and math,’ I might’ve paid attention.”

4. Consistency demands adaptation
“You never know it all,” Marzi argues. “More often than not, there’s so much more to learn that it can be quite humbling.” Beer is a living thing, made by human beings with ever-changing raw materials and technologies. “There are very few consistencies. You need to adapt and grow in order to be consistent. If you get in a rut or you’re resistant to change, you’re done.”

5. Kick it old style
The first of Marzi’s recipes to graduate to production was Harpoon Alt. It was based on the beer Marzi fell in love with in Düsseldorf. “I thought it was a great beer,” he says. “The problem was, very few people knew what an Alt was in 1995. You’d go out to a bar and people would say, ‘Oh, I really like that A-L-T,’ and they’d spell it like the IPA. No, it’s ‘Alt,’ it means ‘old.’ ‘Oh, it’s old?’ No. Nevermind.” A decade later, Marzi got to resurrect the recipe for a decidedly better-educated consuming public. Beer drinkers nailed the pronunciation the second time around.

6. Use both sides of your brewer brain
Marzi must ensure that Harpoon’s production line, led by flagships IPA and UFO Hefeweizen, remains consistent, despite being brewed in two states, on two different systems. Meanwhile, his brewers are constantly chasing innovation. “In some ways, we get the best of both worlds,” he says. Maintaining consistency is “not an easy thing to do.” On the other hand, “If all you did was make one beer all the time, it’d be a challenge, but I think you might tire of that challenge. We’re pressing boundaries and trying new styles and trying to be as creative as we can be.”

7. Make that pilot system take off
Harpoon brewers flex their muscles in the brewery’s 100 Barrel Series, an ongoing series of one-off releases. The line is a way to reward creative impulses that wouldn’t otherwise have a commercial outlet. The series has featured a Wheat Wine, Barleywine, Saison, Smoked Porter, Kellerbier, Wet Hop IPA and collaborative beers with brewers from Denmark and Scotland. Last May, Heissner returned to brew a Red Rye Ale. “We’ve got a small pilot system, and the guys are constantly brewing. That’s what we do—we have fun coming up with new styles.”

8. Big beers demand big taste
Last summer, Harpoon launched its Leviathan Series of big beers. It’s currently bottling a massive Baltic Porter, an IPA that clocks in at 122 IBU, and a Belgian Quad. “There are some people who’ve said, ‘You kind of came late to the party.’ Well, no. When we came up with Harpoon Ale, it was an extreme beer. When we came out with the IPA—it was, ‘Nobody will ever drink this, it’s 42 IBU, 5.9 percent, are you kidding me?’” In Marzi’s mind, the ale and IPA have lasted for the same reason that the Leviathans are now catching fire—labels aside, they’re ridiculously drinkable.

9. Come on over and have a few
A few times a year, Harpoon invites thousands of thirsty rowdies to pile into a tent in its backyard, enjoy some music and drink brewery-fresh pints. “That’s what we love about beer. Beer is social and tactile, and to actually come down here and see the tanks, touch the tanks, meet the brewers and the owners—you can’t replace that.” That’s especially true, Marzi says, because “there’s no face of Harpoon. Dan and Rich are the founders, I’m the brewmaster, but it’s Harpoon as a whole. It’s the company, and it’s the beer.” ■