Best Brewery Experience?

Bearded Iris Brewing in Nashville TN ranks right up there for me. Excellent beer, super friendly and helpful staff. Very knowledgeable about their products. Great atmosphere. Really can't say enough good things about this place. Can't wait to go back!

 

I have had near universal great trips for the breweries I've hit over the years. Great enthusiastic, knowledgible and friendly staff, folks that like to discuss, learn and brew great beers, so many fellow travelers and the discussions which follow. Breweries of all sizes.

AleSmith was my favorite California visit with their "secret" barrel aged room and awesome staff and offerings. Love Revolution's Q & A discussion regarding their Deep Woods program last year, and they always run great release events. Prop Day and the Block Party are great Goose Island events. 3 Floyds has great tunes food and beer. Alarmist Brewing is a small brewery close to my house, I love their dedication to keeping cask condition pours available (Revolution and sometime GI Clybourn are the only other two hometown brewers I am familiar with regularly carrying CC pours). I go to Vegas a lot, and Tenaya Creek and Lovelady are great places to have a few pours.

I saw the other thread about worst brewery experiences and I couldn't think of one. It truly is a great time to be a beer enthusiast!

 

Best brewery experience for me would have to be at Rodenbach in Roselare, Belgium. Before the tour, you can enjoy pretty quality coffee and chocolate while watching an educational film about the past and present of the brewery. The historic grounds and brewing equipment, as well as the modern equipment, are interesting and pleasurable to walk through/around/in. Walking around in their enormous aging cellar, with the massive number of foeders, was also really cool. Talking to both a brewer and cellarman about the processes at Rodenbach was personally enlightening on a brewing front. Lastly, you end up in a taproom where you get free pours of the Rodenbach offerings, and can pick up bottles at a price point below any I've ever seen. A really good day.

 

Burley Oak for a release (including trades and shares). Tree House with old and new friends. Hill Farmstead sitting and sipping looking over the Vermont countryside. Actually every brewery I have visited is a unique place and experience.

 

I don't get to many breweries. I'm the only beer drinker in my family, and I don't agree with dragging kids to breweries. My two favorite experiences were TRVE here in Denver, and matchless in Tumwater WA. TRVE is my hometown favorite for a few reasons. First, with hand forged iron light fixtures and the largest single slab oak top table, along with the dark photography on the walls and metal playing in the background the place really feels like home. Once you figure in the great to amazing beers they have and the friendly service, i couldn't imagine a better brewery. I don't get there often, which makes it even more of a treat when I do go.
Matchless didn't look like much heading in. It's tucked away in an industrial complex, and is pretty sparse inside. Dogs, families, the usual. The staff was super friendly, immediately striking up conversation more so than any other brewery I've visited. The brewer was there and jovial, and the beers were fantastic. They had a wet hopped helles that was fan freaking tactic. The whole vibe there was just different than most places and I really dug the experience.

 

I haven't really been to too many breweries, but my tour at Swamphead was pretty nice. For starters the tour is $5 and you get a pint glass filled from the tap. $5 for a filled pint glass is not bad in and off itself. It ended up being a private tour for me (no one else showed up), which really gave the tour guide flexibility to show me what I wanted and more time on certain things based on my interest etc. In the end, the guide said that their kölsch should be ready and I got to have a bit of their kölsch right then then and their which was pretty neat.

 

Funny story...
I just realized my step brother founded that buoy beer in Astoria. I remember hearing how he was working on a project with a brewer specializing in authentic lagers, but I see now it was really successful. I’ll have to get ahold of him next time I’m up that way.
...Otherwise I liked Russian River and Lost Abbey for an event years back.

 

de garde is a great story and experience. The Oregon Coast is so unique, it’s a fitting brewery for the area.

 

Sierra Nevada Mills River.

Loved the Heritage Tour, loved the facility, and loved the food!

 

I have a good time at any brewery or beer establishment when I’m with people who truly love beer, want to talk about it, have a real enthusiasm about it and are just good people.

You can insert any brewery’s name here, and I’ve been to quite a few of them, but give me that environment and I’m fine.

 

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

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!

 

A few (in no particular order):

1) Patriot Acres (Sudlersville, MD)- small farm brewery in a super small town. Was sitting around a table with my parents and my girlfriend, when a goat comes and sits in the fifth chair around the table. Great beer and super friendly owners.

2) Streetcar 82 (Hyattsville, MD)- had the pleasure of running into my middle school science teacher here (twice). Last person I ever thought I would share a drink with.

3) Collision Bend (Cleveland, OH)- after ordering a giant plate of plate of beer cheese fries, the busboy came up to me and said "I know I'm not the only one smoking weed today!"

4) Blue Stallion (Lexington, KY)- having my boss throw me a going away party here, when I went to Ireland for the summer.

5) Dogfish Head (Milton, DE)- taking the tour and realizing how much I had in common with Sam Calagione.

6) Pen Druid (Sperryville, VA)- no wi-fi, no cell service and the guy next to me was trying to remember which brewery made Moose Drool. Randomly found the answer in a craft beer book they had on hand.

Plenty of other great experiences... there's only 2 or 3 breweries that I've had truly bad experiences at.

 

Kern River. Haven’t been there in a long time but it had Super friendly staff,Great food, live music and the greatest view to enjoy a Citra with. I can’t wait til my baby boy hits a few years old and I’ll take him up there with my wife to fish and enjoy the scenery, what more could a man want?

 

New Glarus was outstanding.

 

Alchemist, Source Brewing in Colts Neck, NJ and Post and Beam in Peterborough NH- they restored an old Grand Army of The Republic hall and saved it from caving in (and the beer is great).

 

+1 on both of these.

 

I have been to ton of breweries and really enjoy the tours. Two stick out to me:

1) Cantillon - I was there on a brew day. As expected, it was a unique and magical place. It was fascinating looking at their vintage equipment that is still seeing heavy use. Plus the post tour beers....

2) Half Acre - We did an annual German Pub Crawl through the neighborhood. Half Acre was just starting out and they agreed to host our group for a tour and some beers. Daisy Cutter right out of the tanks was amazing. We had been drinking German beers all day, so those hops really popped.

 

Best/Most interesting experiences would be 2 distinctly different instances:

1) Dirty Bucket Brewing (WA) ~ say what you will about the name and beers, the owner was pretty cool to let the public into the brewing area during a statewide open house event. We got to see the brewing up close and even sample off the ferm tanks too which was, at the time, a first for me. A neat experience overall really.

2) Chainline Brewing (WA) ~ First time there and was their anniversary with some unique releases. Stuck around a while, sampling and chatting. They had a raffle and even with the amount of tickets I had (I believe you got one per pint) didn't win a thing. No biggie really. The bartender gave me an empty growler for being a chill customer and not winning. Was really cool to get that and has endeared them to me ever since. Do a good beer too.

Honorable mention to Funky Bow (ME). Heard about them in this site's magazine and checked them out when I was in New England. Ended up going on Memorial Day weekend (didn't realize till I was there) and it was just a cool place. Talked to locals, owners took some on an impromptu tour of the really cramped crew house but it was cool. Great day/evening overall really.