Sam Adams Tour - TripAdvisor

TripAdvisor has compiled and released a list of what they think are the top 10 brewery tours in America.  I’m sure you will probably disagree with at least some, which are heavy on the industrial and very large craft brewery side of things.

Here’s the list:

1. Anheuser Busch Brewery Tour, Saint Louis, Missouri
2. Samuel Adams Brewery, Boston, Massachusetts
3. Coors Brewery, Golden, Colorado
4. Lakefront Brewery, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
5. Jacob Leinenkugel Brewing Co., Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin
6. Stone Brewery, Escondido, California
7. Terrapin Brew Company, Athens, Georgia
8. Harpoon Brewery / Mass Bay Brewing Co., Boston, Massachusetts
9. New Belgium Brewing, Fort Collins, Colorado
10. Boulevard Brewing Company, Kansas City, Missouri

It’s fair to think that seeing an Anheuser Busch or Coors brewery may not be great once you get to the tasting room, but I actually think it would be interesting.  Maybe not top-three interesting, but probably somewhere on the list.

SABMiller's brewery boat

Last week we wrote about an ocean-going scientist who missed beer just a little too much while at sea.  He found a way to brew by using a coffee maker and ingredients available on the ship.

Well, if that was a nano brewery, SABMiller has answered with the macro version — a full-sized ocean-going cargo ship, turned into a floating brewery.  A consulting firm helped Miller plan for 2030, a time when they think massive ecological or societal issues could disrupt the production of beer.

SABMiller has envisaged a “Marginal Survival” scenario for 2030 whereby breweries are located on ships so beer makers can move with people and resources and away from natural or man-made catastrophes.

The scenario is one of four that SABMiller has developed with the help of innovation consultancy, Innovia Technology, to imagine what brewing will look like 20 years from now.

Marginal Survival is the most extreme scenario under which the world is faced with major water and energy limitations forcing people to migrate from areas of water shortage or turbulent weather.

In such a situation SABMiller imagines that brewers could build smaller, mobile breweries that would move from place to place on the back of a ship.

I love beer, and in the face of natural or man-made catastrophes, it could be a nice stress reliever at the end of a long day of apocalyptic cleanup or zombie wrestling.  But even as much as I love beer, I think the world may have other priorities.  Credit to SABMiller for planning ahead though.

Iron Hill Brewery/Huffington Post

Huffington Post blogger Amber DeGrace recently spent a day helping out at Iron Hill Brewery in Lancaster, PA.  We’ve written about working at breweries as a vacation activity in the past, and Amber’s description gives you a little understanding of what to expect.

Brewing started at 8:00am and I arrived eager and ready to observe. Little did I know that I’d be getting down and dirty with them! I donned the pair of knee-high rubber boots provided for me and pulled on the elbow-length rubber gloves that would protect me from any accidental splashes from hot liquid or caustic chemicals. The beer of the day was a pumpkin ale, containing 2-row Breiss, Weyermann Pils, Weyermann Munich, Breiss C-60, Weyermann Caramunich, Fawcett Pale Chocolate, Northern Brewer Hops, East Kent Golding Hops and an 18-generation yeast.

You know those commercials about the special glasses Sam Adams developed for their lager?  Well, you can get yourself one for free by using the information below.

To receive your free glass, please send the UPCs from 3 Samuel Adams 6 packs with an index card that has your name, address, phone number, email, and date of birth to:

INMAR Fulfillment Center
Attn: Boston Lager
Program: BOSBLF01
PO Box 426008
Del Rio, TX 78842-6008

If you live in AL, AR, AZ, CT, HI, IL, IN, KS, KY, MA, MD, MO, NC, NJ, OH, OK, SD, TX, UT, VT, or WV, you do not need to include the UPCs.  And, if you live in TX or VA, you need to include a check for $3 payable to “Inmar”.  (Sorry, but these are required by state laws.).

There is a limit of one glass per person.  As quantities are limited, the free glass offer is available only while supplies last.

NewsObserver.com - CHUCK LIDDY

NewsObserver.com covers a local brewery who’s joining the microcanning trend sweeping from the west coast:

Canning is a much more prominent thing for western breweries, but more and more on the east coast are picking up the practice.  It’s cheaper and more environmentally friendly, but it does have a stigma that comes along with it.  I think most consumers, if they weren’t really thinking about it, would almost always pick up a bottle of something they’ve never had before they’d pick up a can.

With more and more breweries canning their beer, that stigma could easily change.

New Albion Ale, from Aleuminati

The Washington Post has an article up about the “father of craft beer,” Jack McAuliffe, coming out of retirement to help Sierra Nevada celebrate 30 years of brewing.

As a young Navy technician servicing Uncle Sam’s nuclear sub fleet, McAuliffe found himself stationed in Scotland, where he developed a taste for the indigenous ales. When he returned to America, he couldn’t find any equivalent beer, so in 1976 he used his engineering skills to fabricate his own brewery out of cast-off dairy and soft drink equipment.

New Albion Brewing Co. in Sonoma, Calif., was the country’s first modern microbrewery built from the ground up, a harbinger of the craft beer revolution to come.

McAuliffe marketed an ale, a porter and a stout that attracted national attention, including an article in the July 9, 1978, Washington Post. But he found it impossible to make a living turning out dribs and drabs in his 45-gallon brew house. McAuliffe drew up blueprints for a larger brewery with a pub attached, but the United States was slogging through a recession and bankers weren’t interested in lending him the money he needed to build. New Albion folded in 1982; McAuliffe left the beer business and never looked back.

Working with Ken Grossman of Sierra Nevada, they produced “Jack and Ken’s Black Barleywine Ale,” which comes in at 10% ABV, so keep an eye out for it.

DC Brau

Washington, DC upstart brewery DC Brau took a big step this week, as its two founding brewers quit their day jobs and started working full time for the new brewery.  The local blog We Love DC had a write-up on the pair this week, but more interesting than that post is the idea that we’re able to follow the brewery this early in the process.  On their site, they list a few milestones, culminating with the January 2011 opening.

“We’re quitting our jobs, next week,” Brandon Skall tells me. I look over at his business partner, Jeff, who smiles wryly. “From here on out, it’s all DC Brau.” Maybe it’s a crazy thing to do. Starting a business in the best of times is tough, but in this economy it’s especially risky. Still, Brandon and Jeff don’t seem worried, which inspires a certain confidence.

They’re also running a blog, which will hopefully be updated with the daily minutia of getting a brewery up and running.

Sam Adams behind the scenes (Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

CNet reporter Daniel Terdiman recently took a trip through the Sam Adams Brewery and wrote up a nice overview of how everything works.  Most of it is remedial stuff if you’ve followed brewing at all, or even toured a brewery yourself.

Either way, worth the read.  Also be sure to check out the photo gallery.

PBR 1844 (Dan Wei)

This post at Foreign Policy Magazine pointed me to a note about PBR’s premium status in China. It’s not your standard hipster PBR (which has a reputation I absolutely can’t understand), but a high-gravity ale called 1844.

Wei writes:

The above advertisement appears on the inside front cover of the current issue of Window of the South (南风窗), a respected biweekly business magazine. At first glance it looks like an ad for a wine or a brandy, but closer inspection reveals the actual brand: Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer 1844.

1844 was the year that the Pabst Brewing Company was established in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In the US, the beer’s lack of pretension led to a recent upswing in popularity among hipsters.

He links to an excerpt from an interview with Alan Kornhauser, Pabst Brewmaster-Asia, given to All About Beer magazine:

I still like formulating specialty beers. In fact, with Pabst, I just made the first specialty beer in Mainland China. There’s almost no ale in China: I had to smuggle the yeast into the country. I formulated a special high-gravity ale called “1844.” It’s all malt, and we use caramel malts from Germany. The initial aging is dry-hopped rather heavily. Then we do a secondary aging in new uncharred American oak whiskey barrels. We bought 750 brand new barrels to the tune of $100,000. This is a very special beer; it’s retailing for about over $40 U.S. for a 720 ml bottle.

Fascinating stuff.  I haven’t seen, nor have I even heard of, 1844 in the U.S., but if I could find a bottle, I’d absolutely buy it.  It reminds me a little of what Michelob has been trying to do — take a long-time cheap beer, and spin it off into a new direction.

Beer, served from roadkill

We’ve written about Scottish brewery BrewDog before, but they’re in the news again for these completely awesome squirrel koozies, which come as part of their $765 per bottle, 55% ABV beer, “The End of History.”

The story here should be about a 55% ABV beer.  When BrewDog released the 41% “Sink the Bismark” earlier this year, there was an incredible amount of attention paid to the beer itself, and how BrewDog was pushing the boundaries of modern brewing.  “Sink the Bismark,” and I would presume “The End of History,” were brewed by freezing the wort in order to concentrate it, leaving a much more dense, port-like beer.

With their latest release, everyone (including me) is focusing on the packaging.  I suppose the publicity stunt is the right way to do it if they wanted the attention — people are only going to write about the highest ABV beer so many times.  “Sink” came in brown paper bags decorated with a hand-drawn penguin, “History” comes in roadkill.  If I was going to drop $765 on a single beer, I’d want to save the bottle, and no standard glass beer bottle can properly display both the price tag and the uniqueness of the beer quite like one wrapped in a dead squirrel.