Most Interesting Breweries

Forgot to mention that Mt. Angel, OR has Benedictine Brewing. The Benedictine Abbey’s monks brew the beer, use their own well water, and grow their own hops. As close to a Trappist beer in the West as you can get, without the restrictions. A pretty awesome place as well.

 

I've been to Burley Oak a few times. Pretty cool "hang out" type of brewery for sure. Solid beers as well by many styles. Not sure where it fits in as a "most interesting" brewery though. Pretty standard taproom vibe. Outdoor area is cool how they did it all with spare parts/spare wood etc to be super-practical/efficient. I love that stuff. I frequently surf down at Assateague and it makes for a great post-surf session pitstop with my Spicoli surf buds to have a beer and talk about our surf day. Great vibe in that regard.

 

Not so much a brewery, but I find the grouping of breweries around Industrial Way in Portland, ME really interesting. I think Geary was there first, in a nondescript industrial park way out of town. Then Allagash built a swanky tasting room off their production facility before a whole bunch of craft houses (Foundation, Austin Street, etc.) moved in, each with its own business model and customer experience, drawn by the high ceilings and waste water containment systems of the old auto repair buildings. Food trucks and other concessions followed. Now you can make a unique "beer district" day out of a visit to this somewhat out of the way place that not a lot of people know about.

 

Samuel Smith for there fierce dedication to tradition. That used to not be as special to me but I have realized more indepthly how rare and special Traditonal English Ales are here and I want to hold onto that as long and tight as I can.

 

Mob Craft in Milwaukee. People submit ideas or recipes and they are voted on by preordering the one you like. Whichever one gets the most preorders is the beer they brew.

 

Recently took the tour at the New Belgium Brewery in Fort Collins, CO. Awesome facility, awesome town and awesome tour (free samples!).

 

As you would expect their beers are all over the spectrum. They were on the show “Shark Tank”. The owners wanted funding to build their own brewery to better manage quality control. The investors thought they should continue contract brewing and turned them down. You could tell by the reactions to sample s they were not used to beer with flavor!

 

HammerHeart Brewing in Lino Lakes, MN. They make unique and delicious beers, with a theme focused on Scandinavian heritage and heavy metal. The taproom is what I imagine Valhalla is actually like.

 

Would you say they've shifted in their focus? Based on what we got in the US, the early years saw emphasis on trying to revive old beers and the later years saw emphasis on things like avocado.

 

I would think that he has an "in" with any like-minded brewer in the Shelton Brothers portfolio (they handle his beers in the US, and work with him on travel for promotion).

 

certainly Tired Hands. they've been pushing the envelope since they opened. hand foraged ingredients, scads of collaborations, incorporation of almost any fruit you could think of, black garlic!, barrel aging, dry hopping, solid lagers, local sourcing, weird artwork and eclectic cuisine. you might not like all of their stuff but with over 1400 different brews there's something for everyone.

 

Kent Falls Brewing in CT.
A true working farm brewery. Every batch they produce provides unique innovations with different combinations of yeasts and/or bacteria (cultured on their farm) for their farmhouse ales. Everything I've had there is outstandingly interesting, and usually (:-) delicious! They recently opened a distillery in Port Chester NY, which only provides them more inspiration for amazing products. Haven't had it yet, but Batch 100 is a gratzer aged in their distillery's first bourbon barrel.
Also, Two Roads Brewing in CT - They opened up "Area 2" recently, for sours, barrel-aged beer, and experimental brews. A huge beautiful expansion - had to be kept separate from their standard facility because of the bacteria cultures. Great stuff going on in CT!

 

I enjoyed my visit to Únětický pivovar (located in Únětice, CZ) yesterday:

Prague Lager trip report No. 9 (Sunday 9/29/19)

Today my wife and I decided to travel to the town of Únětice which is 8 km (about 5 miles) from Prague as the crow flies. It was a 20 minute ride via Uber.

As we got out of our Uber car this is what we saw:





Beer Tour of Únětický pivovar

We took the 12:00 (noon) tour of the brewery. The ‘downside’ is that the tour was conducted in Czech but later on the tour guide (a young fellow who is a brewer there) did answer some questions in English.

The first part of the tour was concerning malt. All of the discussion here was in Czech but I got a chance to see several bags of malt stacked up. As their base malt they use malt from Kounice:

· There were 50 kg bags of Pilsner

· There were 25 kg bags of Munich



And I only saw one type of specialty malt sitting around: Weyermann Caramunich II.

Every piece of equipment I saw in the brewery was stainless steel – no copper.

The next part of the tour was the fermentation room. There are 6 round open fermenters:



There were also 4 square vessels but they were empty; I am not sure what these are used for.

The next stop was the lagering room. The first thing we saw were 8 larger sized lagering tanks (vertical in orientation). There were also a few smaller tanks in there as well. I took notice of a monitoring display on the wall with most of the indicators reading 1 °C but one read 5 °C and one was 2 °C. These were the temperatures of the individual lagering tanks. I asked the tour guide how long they lagered their beers and he stated about 30 days.



The beers are packaged in two formats: kegs and plastic bottles.

As the tour was finishing I asked the tour guide another question and after answering he asked me “Are you a brewer?” to which I responded “Yes”. He then asked “Would you like to drink something?” and needless to say I enthusiastically responded “YES!”. He took me back to the lagering tanks and ‘poured’ me from the tank a glass of the 10° beer. It was very good! He made mention this beer is solely brewed using Pilsner malt.

As we both drank beer we continued to chat and below is part of that conversation:

· He worked an internship during the summer at Pilsner Urquell in the recent past

· Únětický pivovar only produces a dark lager during Christmas time

· They solely use Saaz pellet hops (T-90)

· He stated that it is the brewery’s goal to minimize diacetyl in their beer. He made mention that at PU this is not a goal.

Beers & lunch in the Beer Garden

Firstly, here is a photo of the beer menu hanging in the bar area:



There are four beers available: 10°, 12°, 10.7° and a 14° special

The 10°, 12° and 14° are unfiltered while the 10.7° was filtered.

There is a very nice Beer Garden at the brewery and it was an absolutely idyllic day – pretty blue skies, puffy white clouds, and warm temperatures. We shared a picnic table with Ivan and Marek and we had a wonderful conversation as we drank many glasses (0.5 liter) of beer and ate excellent food for lunch (venison stew for me and roast boar for my wife).



Both my wife and I enjoyed three glasses of beer from 10° -> 12° ->14° and I had one more last beer of 10°.

The first beer of 10° was very nice. It had a nice aroma and very subtle aspect of diacetyl. Below is a photo of that first beer.



The 12° did not have a drastically different flavor profile from the 10° but the level of diacetyl was more noticeable; I would describe it as being a subtle flavor of diacetyl.

The 14° had a notable flavor of diacetyl. Neither my wife or I were a fan of this beer but to my wife’s credit she did finish her glass.

Over the course of the afternoon my wife had to say “I love this place” at least a dozen times. At the end of the afternoon she even stated: “We are going to move here!”. Yeah, I liked this place but we will not be moving.

An interesting aspect of the beer garden is that the locals like to come there on their bikes. At the peak there had to be over 3 dozen bikes parked there:

Unfortunately all good things must come to an end so as we were leaving I purchased a bottle of beer for at the hotel consumption (a 1.5 liter plastic bottle). On the label is notched: 10/18/2019 – a best by date I presume. I joked with our new found friends Ivan and Marek: Everything is great in the Czech Republic but the bottles of beer are too small.



Na Zdravi!

 

Take what I am about to say with the understanding/caveat that the majority of my beer consumption has been at pubs (drinking beer on draft).

I took a tour of Pilsner Urquell a week ago and during the tour the tour guide pointed toward the portion of the packaging line that is used to fill plastic bottles and stated that very soon that will be removed - PU will stop packaging in plastic.

Earlier today I visited a local to me supermarket of Tesco to purchase something and while I was there I went through two aisles of beer. There were some beers in plastic bottles (large format) but the majority of the beers were in bottles or cans. I purchased one bottle of Bernard Světlý Ležák 12° (Pilsner) to take home and drink (tomorrow evening).

On a separate but related matter I was at the U Medvidku pub drinking some Budweiser Budvar (tankovna beer) and I saw three people come in with large plastic bottles (one was a soda plastic bottle - Fanta) and get them filled with beer from the taps. I joked to my wife: "Look, those are Czech grpwlers". I have only seen this on this one occasion so I have no idea how prevalent this practice is.

Na Zdravi!

 

Yes, think of Czech PET bottles as basically growlers -- a bit of beer to take home and drink. There are a bunch of pubs in Prague who fill them (and well sell you one of you don't have a bottle)