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Blackthorn's Guide to Touring Breweries

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Touring Breweries

Imagine a vacation where all you did was tour breweries and sample beers from all over the nation. This kind of vacation is now possible in this country. The proliferation of microbreweries has reached such an epic proportion in the U.S. that every major city – and many smaller burgs – have breweries that offer guided tours. Naturally, not every beer fan is going to be able to convince their spouse of the fun and excitement of a brewery-tour-style vacation, but it is easily feasible to work a couple of brewery stops into the family road trip. After all, brewery tours are educational and interesting for the whole family!

Most brewery tours take place on the weekends, so make sure to take this into account with your holiday planning. Some brewery tours are free, others cost a small amount (usually $5 or so), and sometimes reservations are encouraged or required. A little research on the interweb will provide all the contact information you will need. It pays to call ahead at the brewery and ask about family, student, or elderly discounts – and to make sure that someone is there!

To determine which breweries to visit, I suggest first searching out the locations of where your favorite beers are made. Many beer companies, even microbrews, have multiple breweries. If you are planning a brewery vacation, it is easy to then connect the dots and start calling about tours in the spots you want to hit. If you have a vacation route already planned out, and have found a brewery that tours on it, you should ask the receptionist if they know of any other touring breweries in the area. In this manner, you can discover some of the local flavor, and perhaps run across your new favorite beer.

Many distilleries also offer tours of their production facilities. Perhaps the most famous of these is the Jack Daniels distillery in Lynchburg. The distillery is located about 75 miles southeast of Nashville, Tennessee, and offers 1 hour and 15 minute tours of the facility. The Jack Daniels tour incorporates informative information about the distilling process, historical anecdotes about the famous whisky, and a chance to buy commemorative bottles at their White Rabbit bottle shop. Although Moore county, where the distillery is located, is a dry county, and it forbidden to sell any form of alcohol, the distillery has a special legal dispensation to sell small commemorative bottles there.

Another fun and interesting brewery tour is that of TAKARA Sake works in Berkeley, CA. I heard from many friends about the quality of this tour for years before I was able to make it. This tour features a sake museum and an instructional video about sake making and its history. At the end of the tour, the generous hosts of TAKARA Sake treat the (21+) brewery tourists to a tasting of 11 different kinds of sake. This tour is quite a treat, and a must see for any brewery fan touring breweries in Northern California, especially the San Francisco Bay Area.

For Texans, the Shiner brewery tour is an easy jaunt. If you are interested in how a larger brewing operation works, you can visit this brewery where the daily production reaches approximately 8,000 cases of beer and 500 kegs. The Spoetzl Brewery is one of the fewer than 170 breweries in the U.S. that survived prohibition, and is still going strong to this day. As far as breweries go, this is a historical operation. Located conveniently close to San Antonio, Houston, and Austin, the Spoetzl Brewery offers tours Monday through Friday at 11 a.m. and 1:30 p.m.

The few brewery tours listed here give you some idea of the breadth and variety of brew tour adventures available to the general public. While researching your brewery tour vacation, keep an eye out for the unusual, perhaps a drink you are not used to. You will come away educated and with a greater sense of the variety and adventure available while touring breweries.

A Guide to Barley Wines

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For the serious beer fan, Barley Wines are the pinnacle achievement of the Golden Age of Microbrews.  Built to last, most barley wines are best served years after their inception date.  The many hued flavors of the barley wine are known to change, bringing out a variety of different tastes depending on when they are opened.  Some barley wines have been known to age well even after 10 years.  For this reason, many brew hobbyists collect barley wines of different vintages, as would a conessuier of fine wines.

The term Barley Wine comes from the a seasonal style of beer from England.  Usually made in the Fall or Spring, the Barley Wine would be served around October or March.  Bass Brewery was the first to coin the term commercially for their No.1 Ale, circa 1900.  The earlier version of the barley wine is generally considered to be the “Old Ale”.  According to CAMRA, the English organization for the promotion of REAL ALES old ales are a pre-industrial revolution brew that relied upon high alcohol content to keep it from turning to vinegar.  Used often as an adjunct to mixed porters to make the beer go farther.  While most barley wines are upwards of 7% alcohol, Old Ales can be classified from as low as 4%.  In current makes of Old Ale, bottle conditioning is a standard feature.

Two of the finest barley wines I have run across are the Old Guardian from Stone Brewing Company and the Bigfoot Ale from Sierra Nevada Brewing Company.  Both of these companies are based the west coast of the United States, but varieties of barley wine are brewed all over the country, and the world.  My personal experience ranks Sierra Nevada’s Bigfoot Ale as a fine collector’s item.  It seems to age well.  At a barley wine tasting I had some of a bottle that was 7 years old, a real treat.  It was fine and better tasting than the current year’s.  Old Guardian, on the other hand, has the signature hop character of the Stone Brewery, and should be best served within three years, by my knowledge of how hop character disappears with age.  It is also one of the lightest of the Barley wines currently available, so if you dislike dark beers, this would be the barley wine for you to try.

Stone breweries also occasionally makes an incredibly powerful ale called “Double Bastard”.  This ale is remarkable for its similarity to Stone’s “Arrogant Bastard” ale.  I could probably not tell the difference in a taste test, but I wouldn’t bet on it.  The shocking thing is that Double Bastard has literally DOUBLE THE ALCOHOL of Arrogant Bastard.  Truly, it is a rare and masterfully crafted ale.  While I do not know if it is marketed as a Barley Wine, it certainly deserves mention here as one of the strongest beers on the market.

One of the strongest of Barley wines is the Olde School from Dogfish Head Brewery.  This Ale comes out at a whopping 15% ABV.  Another interesting sounding product is the Bourbon Barrel Barley Wine from Sprecher Brewery.  I have had something similar, a bourbon Barrel conditioned cream porter from MacTarnahan’s Brewery.   That was a very fine ale, a special release, with vanilla and charcoal overtones and the same creamy goodness that MacTarnahan’s offers in its cream porter.

Of note in the world of barley wines are also the offerings of Anchor and Rogue Brewing Companies, both renowned for the quality of their ales.  Rouge’s Old Crustacean is sure to age well over the years, not to mention the interesting bottle, which can be displayed as a worthy drinking trophy!  Old Foghorn is Anchor’s brand, a nice dark and rich barley wine.

If you are further interested in Barley Wines, I suggest contacting your local quality liquor store and reminding them that you are interested in these specialty ales.  Start your collection today, and in the years to come you will reap the rewards that only a finely aged barley wine can offer you.