Lord Hobo Brewing Company
Daniel Lanigan put a 40-barrel brewhouse into a Woburn warehouse that used to hold a granite company, and the first beer out of it in June 2015 was Boomsauce, an 8% double IPA. The taproom sits at the plant, so the brewery-only tanks pour here.
Why go
Lanigan spent years looking at empty buildings in Boston, could not make one work, and went to the suburbs.1 What followed was fast. Andy Crouch put the 2016 growth at more than 400 percent, over 15,000 barrels, and by 2019 the brewery made 47,000.1 Then it went the other way: 30,000 barrels in 2020, 23,000 in 2022, 17,000 in 2023, about what it brewed five years earlier.1 Lanigan stepped down as chief executive in 2021 and sold his last shares back to the company in 2023.1 The room he built is still here and it is big: two indoor sections, 40 draft lines each, over 400 people, a kitchen doing craft pizzas and sandwiches.2
Order this / avoid
- Order: Boomsauce, the double IPA that came out of these tanks first and carried the brand.1
- Order: whatever is marked brewery-only. That is the argument for standing in Woburn rather than buying the cans at home.2
- Order: 617, if you want the one they fought Stony Creek for and won. It pours at Fenway too.1
- Avoid: an early weekday visit. Monday through Thursday the doors open at 4pm.2
What locals & experts say
- Andy Crouch, All About Beer (June 2024), on the brewery's first years:
Riding a wave of growing popularity of the New England IPA style, Lord Hobo Brewing grew at an absolutely insane clip.
1
Good to know
- Walk-in only, every day.2
- Different business: the Lord Hobo bar in Cambridge was Lanigan's and is not this brewery. Crouch reported in 2024 that it can no longer trade under the name.1
Verdict
listed — The draw is mechanical and real: this is the production plant, so the brewery-only tanks pour here and nowhere else, on 40 lines. Against that, Andy Crouch's reporting has output falling from 47,000 barrels in 2019 to 17,000 in 2023, and the founder out of the company since 2021. A 400-seat room in a Woburn industrial park needs a reason beyond proximity, and the tap list is the one I can hand you.