 |
| This isn't a museum. It's Anchor's Historic Brewhouse (Photon courtesy of Anchor Brewing) |
Unlike most businesses with tightly protected company
secrets, many breweries happily throw open their doors to let you experience
their sights, sounds, and tastes. You
can tour four of California’s leading breweries changing the way our nation
experiences beer, and here’s what you’ll find.
Go to Anchor Brewing and you’ll see a piece of San Francisco history. The brewery is housed in a four story Depression-era brick building in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill neighborhood. Visitors meet in brewery’s tap room, with its classic carved wooden interior and old brewery photographs, which include Janis Joplin happily enjoying an Anchor Steam. The brewery itself, with its old copper kettles and brick interior, looks like something out of a museum, but is where all of Anchor’s beer is brewed today.
The tour starts with recounting of the tumultuous history of Anchor Brewing. It’s one of the oldest breweries in the United States, dating back to the Gold Rush-era in San Francisco. It survived the 1906 Earthquake and Prohibition, but nearly went out bankrupt in 1965 before Fritz Maytag, a recent Stanford graduate from a Midwestern family of prominent dairy farmers (think “Maytag Blue Cheese”) learned of the imminent demise of his favorite beer and purchased 51% of the business.
While saving the brewery, Maytag carefully studied brewing
methods from the brewery’s earliest period, when San Francisco breweries were
known for their “Steam Beer” fermented in open vats often on roof tops with the
cool San Francisco climate providing natural refrigeration. It’s a brewing practice that had long been
abandoned, most likely due to the likelihood of wild yeasts and other airborne
microbes ruining a batch.
Maytag developed a system of open shallow vats in a more
controlled environment to replicate brewing technique, and today every drop of
Anchor Steam slowly ferments in these vats. A highlight of the tour is catching a glimpse
of these vats, which had long been a brewery secret. As
brewery spokes person Candice Uyloan describes, “These fermenters are an
important part of our unique brewing history and represent a marked difference
from the vertical tanks found in other breweries. Except for the occasional hot
day, we still simply use the naturally cool air from San Francisco's foggy
coastal climate.”
After viewing the brewing equipment and bottling line, the
tour concludes back in the brewery tap room where visitor can taste between 6-8
Anchor Beers, depending on the season.
Uyloan adds “We would like visitors to leave knowing that every Anchor
beer comes from the hands of people who love and are dedicated to what they do.”
Tour Information
The brewery offers two tours a day on Weekdays. Tour reservations are taken up to six months
in advance and dates fill up quickly, often weeks in advance. Call 415-863-8350 for more information and to
make reservations. Admission is free.
Tiny, rustic Booneville, with its 1,000 residents, looks
like a typical small town, but is like no place on earth. It’s home to an eclectic group of artists and
some of the finest Pinot Noir growing land in all of California. It’s
also the source of Boontling, a quirky, folk language of the region that sprang
up in the late 1800’s. Boontling is
largely defunct, save for a few dedicated local practitioners keeping the
language alive. This includes Anderson
Valley Brewing, located on the Southern edge of town, which names their beers
after Boontling phrases and place names.
 |
| Don't let all those controls in the Anderson Valley Brewhouse fool you, none of them actually work. |
Anderson Valley’s
current brewery went online in 2000 after outgrowing its previous location in
central Booneville. The open 30-acre
brewery grounds also include a Frisbee golf course, a tap room, a field of hops
growing up a series of a vertical support lines, and eight goats used to “mow”
part of the grounds.
The Anderson Valley Brewery tour meets in the tap room and
proceeds into the Brew House, where the first thing you’ll see are three
gleaming copper brew kettles recovered from a defunct German brewery. There’s an equally impressive looking old
world control panel that looks like something Captain Nemo used to pilot the
Nautilus, but if you look carefully, a smaller, more modern electronic
controller is actually used to control the brewing equipment.
“We like to educate people on the brewing process,” explains
Rebecah Toohey, Anderson Valley’s Tap Room Manager. “During the tour, we go over the history of
the brewery, as well of each step we take to brew our beer.” This
includes a trip to the hop freezer.
There’s nothing more stimulating the walking into the cold air of the hop
freezer and deeply inhaling all the fresh, piny hops Anderson Valley uses for
beers such as their Hop Ottin’ IPA and Poleeko Pale Ale. Visitors also get to go up on the brewery
roof and see the solar panels which generate about 40% of the breweries electricity,
while learning about the many other environmental initiatives that are part of
Anderson Valley’s commitment to its unique region.
Lagunitas is first and foremost about having a good
time. And everyone working at Lagunitas
seems to be having one, as all the staff at the Lagunitas Tap Room and Beer
Sanctuary has an genuine, infectious enthusiasm for the place. The Tap Room and Beer Sanctuary serves food
and often features live music. Tours
guides announce the start of each tour by clanging a bell and waving a small,
crudely written card board sign above their head. Anyone who wants to join simply follows them
out into the brewery.
 |
| Ryan Tamborski discussing Lagunitas's Barrel-aged Brews |
But behind the goofy humor, one also witnesses a relentless
capitalism. Lagunitas is one of the fastest growing breweries in the United
States, available all over the country, and commanding high prices on the black
market overseas. Ryan happily showed
off the shiny state-of-the-art equipment Lagunitas recently invested in to meet
this exploding demand, and well as telling us Lagunitas’s plans to open a
second brewery in Chicago at the end of this year. Sure,
Lagunitas is a place to have a good time, but touring the place also reveals
how much hard work and commitment must go into creating the good times.
Tour Information
Mondays-Tuesdays 3:00 pm, Wednesday at 3:00 and 5:00 pm,
Saturdays 1:00, 3:00 and 5:00 pm
Call 707-778-8776 for more information
Sierra Nevada is where to go to learn a lot about beer.
“We have a very technical tour, “explains Marie Gray, Tour
Coordinator for Sierra Nevada. “We get a
lot of questions from beer craft drinkers who really want to know more about
beer, so we do our best to answer them. It’s
a lot of fun, and we meet a lot of great people out there.”
 |
| The dignified splendor of Sierra Nevada's Brewhouse |
The tour takes over an hour and carefully goes over every
step of the brewing process. It starts in
the mill room, which prepares the malted barley for brewing. Next in the Brew House, large room with impressive copper brewing
kettles, visitors can peer into to see the mash through glass
windows. You can actually sample a taste
of wort, the liquid full of extracted sugars from malted barley, used in Sierra
Nevada Pale Ale to understand how the hops and fermentation transforms the
sweet liquid into beer. There is also an
invigorating trip to the Sierra Nevada hop freezer room as well as overhead
views of the bottling and canning lines.
In addition to
brewing, visitors learn plenty about Sierra Nevada’s legion of environmental
practices. Climbing up to a catwalk
above the brewery, you’ll look down on no fewer than 10,763 solar panels adorning
the roof. Guests also discover that
hydrogen fuel cells provide approximately 50% of the brewery’s electricity
needs and that Sierra Nevada actually paid to extend a railroad line a few
miles to so that rail cars could roll right up to the brewery, eliminating the
CO2 emissions from trucks transporting supplies those last few miles.
At the end, there’s a tasting of eight samples of different
Sierra Nevada beers at the brewery tap room, and even this is used as an
opportunity to educate. “We try to make
it an educational tasting, where people learn to enjoy the different aromas and
flavors of beer,” explains Marie. “In
the end, our guests walk away with a really good experience.”
For those more interested in Sierra Nevada’s environmentally
sustainable practices, the brewery hosts Sustainable Tours on Fridays,
Saturday, and Sunday the focus on Sierra Nevada’s environmental initiatives. There is also beer tasting at the end of this
tour, but is held in an outside garden, weather permitting, and consists of four
samples.
Tour Information
Tour Hours:Monday – Thursday: 11:00am 12:00 pm, 1:00 pm, 2:00 pm 3:00pm & 4:00 pm
Friday and Saturday: 11:00am 12:00 pm, 12:30pm, 1:00 pm, 2:00 pm, 2:30pm 3:00 pm, 4:00 pm, 4:30pm & 5:00 pm
Sunday: 11:00am 12:00 pm, 12:30pm, 1:00 pm, 2:00 pm, 2:30pm 3:00 pm, 4:00 pm
Phone: 530-899-4776
No comments:
Post a Comment