I recently took a trip to Seattle, WA for a long
weekend with my wife. One of the days we
booked a brewery tour with Road Dogs. It
was a great experience as there were only 2 other people on the tour. We were able to stop at three brewers along
the way. Our tour guide Derek was great
to say the least. He had a really
positive attitude, and knew his beer. He
was able to communicate with people that know nothing about brewing to the
higher level of home brewers such as me (or so I think). One side note, no one like a know it all, so
if for some reason you are on a tour and you feel you know more than the tour
guide…keep it to yourself.
Anyways back to the tour.
Our first stop was Georgetown Brewing Company.
This was a very populate brewery with the locals and was one of the
larger production breweries in the city with a 60 BBL brewhouse. The tasting area was well put together and
they also sold growlers that are ready to grab out of their frig. They bottle the growlers on a one-of-a-kind
growler bottler that replaces the oxygen with CO2 so that the growlers have the
shelf life of a bottle beer. The guy we
spoke to say they sold on average two thousand growlers a week. WOW!!! To say
the least.
The second stop was at Pyramid Brewery. This was a larger commercial brewery that was
still making test batches in-house at their brewpub, but the main brewing was
done off site. This really was not a microbrewery
anymore as it is now owned by a large conglomerate out of Costa Rica…weird I
know. Either way they still had some
great beers on tap,
but would say this was my least favorite stop of the tour.
Last with hit up Hale’s Ales. This was the smallest of the three and kind
of the coolest. The best thing about
this place…well there are two things…is that they use open fermentation and a
large number of their beers are on nitrogen.
It is something to order a cream ale that is on nitrogen as the nitrogen
provides you with that creamy head. Also
this place had a brewpub and opened internally to the brewery that you could
walk around on an elevated platform to see.
Very cool. By this time the beer
was flowing and a fourth brewery would have been pushing it as we had been
touring and drinking for the last three and a half hours.
All in all this was a great use of our money and time. I highly recommend these guys and Road DogBrewery Tours if you are headed to Seattle, WA.
Also if you are visiting another city take a look to see if there are
any organized tours, as you may find out they can be a lot of fun.
