Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Where I've been...

So, you may have noticed my activity tailed off for the last however long. Allow me to explain - my dad is in town. In a quest to entertain him, I suggested we attend brewery tours at the two craft breweries whose beers I really enjoy drinking.

troegenator
Tröegs Independent Craft Brewery - Harrisburg, PA: These guys (and, in fact, Tröegenator beer itself) got me started on craft beer years ago. Hearing Chris, one of the founding brothers, talk about beer was a really good insight into how a homebrewer approaches commercial cooking. They said the entire brewery has something on the order of 10 employees; they pretty much only serve Pennsylvania and parts of the surrounding states. They did manage to have all of their current beers on tap, though, which is quite impressive. I ended up with two cases of beer from them and the most metal drinking vessel ever produced - a 30-some-odd ounce ceramic drinking horn.

dogfish
Dogfish Head Craft Brewery - Milton, DE: A very different place. The bottling like has 8 people working near it, the office at least 15 if not more. Any given part of the establishment is larger than the whole of the Tröegs brewery. You can tell they ship a lot more beer, and the fact that the tour guide spent less time talking about the actual brewing process is indicative of a different approach to beermaking. He spent more time on fermentation, which makes sense given that DFH prides itself, in a manner of speaking, on funny approaches to the creation of alcohol. Comparing the beers of the two is pointless, as they serve largely different markets. The only overlap comes on the pale ales offered by Tröegs, which still carry characters unique unto themselves. They had fewer beers on tap for sampling, but had a wider variety of their products for sale.

I'm not sure how much I learned, but I had a good time, and I think my dad did too, which is really what counts in the end. If you like beer, I can recommend either as a good way to kill a day.

5 comments:

  1. Nat,

    The Cherries are blooming here in Birmingham, and it is making me homesick.

    I've been photographically productive, but I'm annoyed with myself because I scanned both 37-exposure sets of slide film backwards. DPP doesn't to batch flipping, GIMP would take forever, and MS-Paint doesn't allow you to select the JPG compression, so every save really takes a toll. It will take me half the time to just rescan them!

    I'm planning on visiting an airshow in TN in two weeks, should be a great test of the 400/5.6L, and I might even use the last of my Kodachrome 200, because it has to be getting close to the shelf date.

    - Josh

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  2. visiting a pepsi bottling plant would be more my style, but at least you got to go somewhere other than a shithole of a place fo employment last week.

    no, my job doesn't suck, not at all.....

    -GMT

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  3. Nat,

    It is a shame I'm looking at so much debt from law school, because some days I'm really tempted to start a cider mill, or a mixed outfit with some of my more beer-inclined friends. I think we haven't seen the bulk of the renaissance in fermented beverages quite yet. Personally, I think we will see the explosion of new local beers continue unabated, but also that cider, mead, and some other beverages that were unable to recover post-prohibition start making a serious comeback. I think Cider could easily be marketed as either a step between wine and beer on the "household party heirarchy" or as a female-market beverage. Might be a good market to be in, but then, I've been terribly wrong before.

    One thing I do look forward to is actually being able to visit places like that. Alabama is so strict about brewing (homebrewing is still technically illegal) that the only real tourist operations here are wineries, and they don't always offer tours of the fermentation processes.

    Oh, by the way, my car is currently green. Damned pollen.

    - Josh

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  4. Of course, besides the debt, there is the total lack of knowledge about chemistry, manufacturing processes or food safety.

    - Josh

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  5. Nat,

    Pictures from today.

    http://www.szulecki.com/images/BordenFlowerBug/index.html

    - Josh

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