The experience of touring a megabrewery is significantly enhanced if you can juxtapose it against touring a microbrewery. Seriously. As a matter of fact, doing both significantly raises both experiences to such a degree that the combination is itself its own completely unique and totally enjoyably experience.
I toured the Coors Brewery in Golden, Colorado several years ago and did no such followup tour of a microbrewery. I was with a huge group of friends, many of which only reluctantly agreed to the Coors Tour and did not share my love of zymurgy and so would probably not have agreed to a microbrew tour even if I’d thought of such a thing…which I didn’t.
To me, the Coors tour was great, it was my first tour of any brewery and I was fascinated by the whole thing. However, I failed to see the difference between the Coors Brewery and any manufacturing plant. Several years later, I still fail to see the difference. In both someone points to various inhumanely-sized tanks and tells a crowd of laypeople the temperature of the tank, where it came from, and then motions to various hoses that lead into and out of the tanks. Then you walk to where the hoses lead. In the case of a brewery it’s often more tanks. In other plants it’s sometimes an oven. In any case, you almost always end up in a huge room filled with conveyor belts which end in rows of packed pallets. What I did not understand then was that a place like Coors needs to be put into perspective. You need to see what they do compared to what others in the same business are doing. You need to see that it’s not just possible to make beer without millions of dollars of metal and PVC but that it’s happening, right there, just miles from where you’re standing.
A couple years later, with dear friend The MCP, I toured the Miller Brewery in Milwaukee (at the time of the 100th Anniversary of Harley-Davidson, no less) and we followed the tour with one of Lakefront Brewery–a combination I heartily recommend. I so heartily recommend it that I repeated the experience just about a year or two later myself. On my most recent pass through Milwaukee about a year ago I went to Lakefront and not Miller and, don’t get me wrong, the beer at Lakefront, the environment, the ambiance, were all good, but, it was…lacking. I could tell from the look on my friends’ faces that, without Miller to provide them a frame of reference, Lakefront just wasn’t all I’d made it out to be in the lead up to the tour.
On this most recent jaunt to St. Louis I found myself, obviously, at the Anheuser-Busch brewery, with a follow-up two days later at the Schlafly Bottleworks and…maybe because Anheuser-Busch is so big…at the Trailhead Brewery in St. Charles.
The most important and most attractive reason to take a brewery tour is because at the end you often get free beer. What megabrewers know and understand, and what I know but do not understand, is that the second most exciting thing about a brewery tour is the bottling operation. People flip their lids about bottle-fillers and little robot glue-licker/bottle labelers. They love to see shiny bottles of beer hoisted from conveyor belts and placed in boxes–boxes getting taped and hoisted onto pallets–pallets getting wrapped–wrapped pallets getting moved to a warehouse. Sometimes you get to see the warehouse. People love to see all that beer in one place even though, even if they lived to be a million years old they could never drink all of it themselves. To me it’s weird.
For one thing, as a beer lover, it pains me to be in the area where megabrewers like Anheuser-Busch actually destroy their beer and brag about it to boot. This whole cold-filtering, pasteurization process is no good for beer. I mean, we all have our tastes and all but let’s call a turd a turd.
The other reason it’s weird is because, if you like to see lots of stuff in one place, there are bigger operations that do their job faster and store more of it than Anheuser does. I mean, what’s the difference between seeing ketchup bottled and beer bottled? Nothing really-not if what you like to see is bottles being filled and crated.
Oh well.
However, each megabrewer has some unique things to offer the tourbound and Anheuser is no exception. The best thing Anheuser offers is Bevo (pronounced to rhyme with the Russian word for beer, pivo, that is: BEE-voh.) Bevo is a fox, based off Renard the Fox from fairytaledom. It is also a now defunct alcohol-free malt beverage (read: near beer) manufactured between 1916 and 1929. Bevo the Fox was the mascot for Bevo the Drink. Bevo the Fox was always in search of Good Food, Good Drink, and Good Times.
Statues of Bevo adorn the four corners of the building in which his signature drink used to be manufactured during those dark prohibition times. In the statues he is happily munching on a huge chicken leg. There is no mystery why a fox would think that a huge chicken constituted Good Food. Nor is there any doubt why having found, killed, and cooked a huge chicken, eating it would be considered Good Times. I do however have my doubts that Bevo the Fox (or anyone else) found Bevo the Drink to be Good. As Wikipedia will tell you, Bevo was so popular that it found itself deep in the pop culture of the Roaring Twenties, typically as a measure of incompetence. A new Army recruit was called a Bevo and it was said of those that couldn’t hold their liquor that they “couldn’t hold their Bevo.” In the absence of beer, Bevo was Good Enough, but not Good, I’m sure.
Nevertheless 100-year old German-style buildings with statues of Foxes eating chicken are pretty awesome and you should take the free tour to check them out. If you don’t like beer Anheuser-Busch is now in the business of making mixed liquor drink like the Bacardi samplers and energy drinks too both of which can be sampled in the Hospitality Room at tour’s end.
Oh! And there are horses too.
The girlfriend and I followed this tour up with a visit to the Schlafly Brewpub the next day, and the day after that we took a tour of the Schlafly Bottleworks (complete with three beer samples). Between the beer I had at the brewpub, the beer I had in the restaurant at the Bottleworks, and the beer I sampled after the tour (and counting those samples I took of the girlfriend’s beer) I tried every beer they currently have tapped. All are good, above average, even. But, in my opinion, the best beer they offer right now is their ESB.
I could venture off into a post better fitted to a gourmet website, but I won’t. It will suffice to say that it:
- It is hard to create a new recipe that creates a flavorful balance between hops, alcohol, and malt flavors
- It is harder to do so within the established confines of pre-existing beer styles
The Schlafly ESB does just that. They have successfully found a new way to present an ESB that is still recognizably an ESB but provides enough newness that it stands out from the rest. Some people try to do perform that task by just moving out of the style: “It’s like an IPA but we made it with FRUIT!” Schlafly did it with pure skill.
We also sampled a couple of beers at the Trailhead Brewery in St. Charles. I had their Brown and their Porter and both were good. My partner had the Blonde also pretty good. Nothing exceptional in the beers although the staff at the St. Charles store were all exceptionally friendly. The brewer took time to personally show us the inner-workings of the establishment even though he was ankle deep in wort at the time, a gesture that I could not show enough appreciation for.
Just for the record: We also took two cases of Tecate with us. In the presence of so much good beer (including some of the sham craft-style stuff that Anheuser puts out) the Tecate became almost undrinkable.
Almost.
