Boston Brewin': The Evolution of Boston's Brewing and Craft Beer Landscapes

This digital publication was supported by the Leventhal Map & Education Center's Small Grants for Early Career Digital Publications program.

Boston’s brewing heritage is deeply entangled with the city’s shifting cultural, economic, and spatial identities. From colonial taverns serving ale brewed with local grains and water, to the vast industrial breweries of the nineteenth century, the city’s beer story parallels larger processes of urban transformation. Brewing in Boston has always been a negotiation between the physical city (its infrastructure, neighborhoods, and industrial capacities) and the symbolic city (its identity, myths, and sense of place).

By the mid-nineteenth century, industrialization enabled breweries to grow in scale and efficiency, clustering in working waterfronts and industrial corridors connected to shipping routes, rail lines, and the port. These networks gave Boston brewers an advantage in production and distribution while rooting the industry in specific geographies¹. Today’s craft beer renaissance draws heavily from this industrial past. Many contemporary breweries in Boston occupy former industrial spaces, such as Night Shift Brewing at Lovejoy Wharf, a former waterfront hub for Boston's shipping and manufacturing industries. When breweries inhabit repurposed nineteenth- and early twentieth-century industrial buildings, their exposed brick walls, steel trusses, and lofty interiors function at once as aesthetic expressions and cultural economic statements about the city's past.

Repurposing industrial spaces is not simply a cost-saving or stylistic decision; it signals a connection to the city’s working-class and manufacturing heritage. In a post-industrial economy increasingly defined by cultural consumption, Boston’s breweries leverage this physical and symbolic infrastructure to position themselves as both local stewards of tradition and innovators in an increasingly globalized craft beer market. Neolocalism becomes a driving ethos, allowing breweries to align their products with narratives of place that are materially grounded in the city’s built environment and historically embedded in its social fabric.

The Growth of Craft Breweries in Boston

The past few decades have witnessed Boston’s entry into a form of “reindustrialization,” not through manufacturing steel, textiles, or heavy goods, but through the cultural production of food, drink, and curated experiences. In the twenty-first century, the number of craft breweries in Boston grew exponentially, increasing from fewer than 50 in 2005 to over 200 by 2023. This shift emerged from the economic vacuum left by mid-twentieth century deindustrialization, when many industrial buildings sat vacant or underused.

The craft beer industry, pioneered locally by the Boston Beer Company and later diversified by a wave of smaller, hyperlocal breweries, has repopulated these structures with a different kind of industry that relies on cultural capital as much as raw production. Boston Beer Company, maker of Samuel Adams, emerged as a pioneer of the craft beer revival. Now a national brand, Samuel Adams retains strong ties to Boston's identity through its name, branding, and storytelling. The figure of Sam Adams pays homage to the city's revolutionary past, while the brewery's location in a district of Jamaica Plain that has housed breweries for over a century ties it to preexisting urban forms.

In this new urban economy, the reuse of former industrial sites is more than a pragmatic choice; it is a strategic one. These buildings sit within existing networks of transportation, water, and energy infrastructure; these systems, amongst others, are logistical advantages that mirror the needs of their original manufacturing occupants. The Massachusetts Water Resources Authority (MWRA) provides the high-quality water essential for brewing, while Boston’s transit system delivers customers from across the metropolitan area to brewery taprooms. Breweries located in accessible areas attract customers using Boston's extensive public transit network. Breweries can be found in Boston's designated cultural districts, such as the Seaport, Fort Point, and Jamaica Plain. These districts promote arts, history, and community engagement, aligning with the ethos of many craft breweries.

The design of these brewery spaces is equally critical. Many Boston breweries embrace an aesthetic of industrial authenticity such raw beams, weathered masonry, and wide-plank floors. These features are convenient because they are already available in the buildings, but perhaps more importantly, they form part of gentrification’s cultural logic. Here, redevelopment is not only an economic transformation but also an aesthetic reframing, in which signs of the past are selectively preserved to create a marketable experience. Taprooms become sites where architectural history is staged, consumed, and folded into the branding of beer itself.

Neolocalism, or the transformation of local distinctiveness into a consumable product, characterizes Boston’s craft beer landscape. Through this process, neighborhood histories, landmarks, and ecologies become powerful branding tools.² A beer named for a local street, historical figure, or regional wildflower is more than a product; it is a curated representation of place, distilled into a consumable form. In this way, craft beer serves as a window into the perceived reality of a city’s ecosystems and culture. The flavors, names, and spatial contexts of Boston’s breweries project a vision of the city that blends nostalgia with present-day urban aspiration, inviting patrons to drink not only a beverage but also to consume a story of place. Boston’s craft beer boom thus reflects more than an increase in production; it signals a reorientation of urban industrial space toward cultural production. The city’s breweries sit at the confluence of economic reinvention, aesthetic curation, and place-based storytelling, embodying the materiality of Boston’s industrial past alongside the ambitions of its post-industrial present.

What's Brewin' in Fort Point?

Trillium Brewing Company—50 Thomson Place

Trillium Brewing Company, founded in 2013, has become one of Boston’s most celebrated craft breweries, and its flagship facility in the Fort Point neighborhood occupies a building with deep industrial roots. The brewery operates in the former Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company facility, a remnant of Boston’s manufacturing heritage. The Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company, once a major producer of glass and coatings, was economically significant to the Boston waterfront for much of the twentieth century, contributing to the industrial vibrancy that made Fort Point a hub for warehousing, production, and shipping. Trillium nods to this history with a beer named “Pittsburgh Street,” accompanied by the note:

Paying homage to Fort Point's manufacturing history, Pittsburgh Street was originally named after the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company. Pittsburgh Street is now known as Thomson Place, named after the Thomson Reuters media firm when they bought the Boston Wharf Company brick and beam building.

This attention to place is a recurring theme in Trillium’s branding, though often with a looser, more symbolic connection. For example, the beer “Broken Bridge” references the Northern Avenue Bridge:

Connecting Fort Point with Downtown Boston for over a century before being taken out of commission in 2014, The Northern Avenue Bridge has been 'broken' since. While plans were announced in May of 2020 to reconstruct the bridge, turning it into a pedestrian and cyclist crossway and gathering space, it's currently serving as a statue at the entryway to the Boston Harbor. Broken Bridge is a continuation of the Trillium tradition of brewing beers inspired by our home.

These naming choices, while occasionally disconnected from the beer’s style or ingredients, function as cultural touch points—geographic branding that fosters a sense of local identity while supporting the commercial appeal and storytelling power of the brewery’s offerings.

What's Brewin' in Fenway?

Cheeky Monkey Brewing Company—3 Lansdowne Street

Cheeky Monkey Brewing Company’s flagship location in Boston’s Fenway neighborhood occupies the former Buck Printing Company facility, a space steeped in both local and industrial history. The Buck Printing Company was once a prominent player in the regional and global print industry, producing high-quality commercial printing that served Boston’s thriving business community and reached clients far beyond the city. In fact, the Leventhal Center holds ten maps printed by Buck, focused on Boston's public transit system and spanning 1936 to 1952. Buck Printing Company's presence contributed to the Fenway area’s mix of industrial and commercial activity in the twentieth century, when proximity to rail lines, roadways, and downtown made the location a strategic hub for production.

Today, Cheeky Monkey is part of a growing network of food, beverage, and entertainment venues clustered around Fenway Park, where craft beer, pub fare, and social games have replaced the hum of printing presses. Once a familiar visual marker for ballpark visitors, the Buck Printing Company sign faced directly toward Fenway Park and stood as a reminder of the neighborhood’s manufacturing identity. Now, the building’s exterior signage and branding highlight its role in Boston’s contemporary leisure economy, signaling the adaptive reuse of historic industrial space for modern urban culture.

What's Brewin' in Dorchester?

Dorchester Brewing Company—1250 Massachusetts Avenue

Dorchester Brewing Company’s sits on a property once owned by Walter H. Tweed, whose tenure reflected a period when the site served more traditional industrial purposes within Boston’s working landscapes. Before its transformation into a brewery, the building functioned in capacities tied to small-scale manufacturing and warehousing, part of the broader economic fabric of Dorchester’s industrial corridor. The brewery’s redesign brought in a notable architectural feature—the “Hopservatory,” a rooftop greenhouse space that combines plant cultivation with public engagement—allowing the facility to retain a sense of industrial productivity while reframing it as an interactive, hospitality-oriented experience. Yet, despite this nod to industrial heritage, Dorchester Brewing Company exhibits a degree of “placelessness,” as it seldom incorporates the surrounding neighborhood’s histories or geographies into its branding or operations. This detachment can be read as a strategic move to craft its own localism, an identity anchored less in inherited place narratives and more in a self-defined community of beer culture and experiential gathering.

What Was Brewin' in Jamaica Plain

American Brewing Company—251 Heath Street

The American Brewing Company, established in 1891 by Irish immigrant James W. Kenney, was located in Boston's Jamaica Plain neighborhood.⁵ The brewery operated until 1918, ceasing production due to the onset of Prohibition. After the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, the American Brewing Company briefly resumed operations but ultimately closed in 1934, likely due to financial difficulties and a competitive market. Today, you'll find the Brewery Lofts, a residential condominium complex that preserves the historic American Brewery building.

Conclusion

Boston’s contemporary brewing industry reveals a spectrum of ways the city both embraces and reinvents its post-industrial past, using beer as a vehicle for place-making, storytelling, and economic regeneration. These breweries (whether deeply rooted in local histories like Trillium and Cheeky Monkey or more self-referential in identity like Dorchester Brewing Company) demonstrate how cultural capital is exchanged through industries capable of simultaneously promoting and critiquing the very landscapes they occupy.

In this light, craft beer becomes more than a leisure product; it is a stage on which histories are selectively remembered, reinterpreted, or even bypassed to suit the demands of branding and marketability. Yet, we cannot ignore that the infusion of craft beer into these former industrial facilities may ultimately be just another chapter in their long geographic biographies—one that will, in time, be replaced or repurposed again. The challenge, then, lies in recognizing that while breweries can create vibrant new cultural economies, they also operate within cycles of spatial reinvention where authenticity, memory, and commerce are constantly renegotiated.

Josh Merced holds a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, completing a dissertation titled "Craft beer landscapes of the American South: An examination of cultural economy and identity production". Merced is currently an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Geography, Planning and Recreation at Northern Arizona University, leading the Placemakers and Community Engagement (PACE) Studio. His research specialty investigates the cultural economy and environmental stressors of the food and beverage industries.

Notes

1. Miller, N. (2015). Boston Beer: A History of Brewing in the Hub. Arcadia Publishing.

2. Flack, W. (1997). American microbreweries and neolocalism: "Ale-ing" for a sense of place. Journal of cultural geography, 16(2), 37-53.

3. Trillium Brewing Company. (2018, October 24). "Trillium sets October 29 grand opening for Fort Point restaurant and brewery." Brewbound.

4. Boston's Hidden Restaurants. (2017, June 23). "Cheeky Monkey Brewing Co. to open in former Tequila Rain space in Boston's Fenway neighborhood." NBC Boston.

5. Jamaica Plain Historical Society. (2006, March 25). Boston's Lost Breweries.