Bog Iron Brewing

Bog Iron Brewing

Bog Iron Brewing is a small nano-brewery located in Norton, Massachusetts. We started this adventure at the tail-end of 2011 and after a solid year of trudging through the licensing, permitting, building, rebuilding, re-permitting, etc. etc., our initial beers will be rolling into a small number of fine establishments within the first weeks of 2013. The story behind Bog Iron’s formation is almost cliché in the brewing industry as a huge number of breweries seem to have started the same way. It all started with a bachelor party in Vegas. The three founders (Brian, Frank, and Matt) had woken up on a Sunday morning, not remembering a single thing from the night before and once awake, they realized they were missing the fourth man! All of the old brewery industry rights-of-passage then ensued. The three friends stole a tiger from Mike Tyson. They tried to pay a ransom to a gangster for their fourth friend only to find out that it was a case of mistaken identity. They whacked a baby in the head with a police car door… hold on. No, no… I’m off base. That was all a movie I think I saw once. Ok, I got it… Brian, Frank, and Matt were actually buddies from a local homebrew club (a shout-out to our boys in SSBC!). Like 98.1% of all homebrewers, they started daydreaming about owning a brewery, putting in long hours, and making very little to no money for their efforts. Well… that sort of scenario sounded too good to pass up and the three began investigating what it would actually take to launch the whole thing. Thirteen-to-fourteen months later and three times the budget we had expected, bingo… Bog Iron Brewing is ready to roll out beers to the public. A quick note on the name… whenever folks ask us what the name of the brewery is and we say, “Bog Iron”, they inevitably say, “Huh??”. We wanted a name that would have some sort of local tie and sounded kind of rugged (I have no real explanation why we wanted that). Frank was looking through some old pictures in the online archives of a certain college that is located about two hundred yards from us and he came across a picture of an iron foundry that was built right down the road from us (it is still there), I believe in the early 1700’s. What did they smelt in this foundry? You guessed it, “bog iron.” It was apparently dredged from the local lakes, ponds, and bogs. Out of what felt like 4.5 million possible names, Frank and Matt loved “Bog Iron.” While Brian whined and moaned (I still don’t like the name), Matt and Frank out-voted him and Bog Iron Brewing was born.