Harpoon parent company buys Vermont’s Long Trail Brewing

As craft beer boom settles, two stalwarts of New England’s brewing scene will join forces.

Harpoon Beer Hall in the Seaport. Harpoon's parent company said Friday it will acquire Vermont-based Long Trail Brewing.

In a deal that combines two of New England’s most longstanding craft brewers, the parent company of Harpoon Brewery has agreed to buy Vermont-based Long Trail Brewing Co.

Mass. Bay Brewing Co., headquartered in the Seaport District, will add Long Trail, as well as its Otter Creek and Shed brands, to a growing portfolio of beverages, which includes Harpoon, UFO Brewing, and Arctic Chill Hard Seltzer. The financial terms of the deal, which was announced Friday, were not disclosed.

Dan Kenary, cofounder and chief executive of Mass. Bay Brewing, said he and Long Trail CEO Daniel Fulham, have been close friends for 35 years. Talks about joining forces began last year, over beers of course. (When the two get together, there’s a longstanding tradition: Fulham drinks a Harpoon IPA and Kenary drinks a Long Trail pale ale.)

Long Trail was planning to consolidate from two breweries to one and Fulham asked whether Harpoon could produce a few of its beers — which have been brewed in Vermont since the company’s founding in 1989, long before the recent explosion of craft brewing.

“The craft beer run-up has been a great run, but the craft beer trends have been down,” said Fulham, whose family fund purchased Long Trail in 2005 after exiting the Seaport seafood business. “As a heritage brand, which is what Long Trail and Harpoon are, we were looking at, ‘How do we operate differently when people are drinking [more] hard seltzer, wine, spirits, and non-alcohol.’”

In exploring different contract agreements with Harpoon, Kenary said it became clear to both brewers that an acquisition made the most sense.

“The Fulhams had been in the investment for a long time, and they were kind of ready to move on,” he said, adding that Harpoon had the brewing capacity to absorb Long Trail — and the companies’ retail footprints overlapped.

That overlap has of course led to some friendly competition over the years, though Fulham said he and Kenary always “respected each other.”

“They would compete in our backyard, and we would work to compete in theirs,” Fulham said. “We were absolutely competitors.”

Though based in Boston, Harpoon has a long history in Vermont. It began 22 years ago when the company purchased the Catamount Brewery in Windsor, which is now a Harpoon Brewery that features a pub and beer garden. Kenary said Harpoon will soon brew Long Trail, Otter Creek, and Shed brews from this location.

Kenary said he didn’t want to acquire both Long Trail breweries in Vermont, one in Bridgewater Corners and the other in Middlebury, but he knew someone who did: the CEO of WhistlePig Whiskey, based in Shoreham. As part of the deal, WhistlePig agreed to buy Long Trail’s Middlebury facility, and it will soon do its bottling and distilling there.

Mass. Bay Brewing, though, will operate the pub and beer gardens at both of the former Long Trail locations. The brewer, which has roughly 240 full- and part-time workers, plans to hire more than half of Long Trail’s 60-person staff, Kenary said.