Ramble On

Friday, August 23, 2013

Lynchburg's Jefferson Street Brewery

As a quick follow-up to yesterday's post about Alexandria's Port City Brewery, I thought I might put something up about another brewery we had the chance to check out recently - Jefferson Street Brewery in Lynchburg.

Now, even though I have applied the label "brewery tours" to this post, we didn't officially get the tour.  This brewery occupies some space in the Craddock Terry Hotel, upstairs in the Waterstone pizza restaurant.  As I understand it, the 7-barrel brewery sells all it makes in the two restaurants at the hotel.

It's a nice arrangement that ensures that the brewery prospers at that scale.  I suppose it is natural that in the lifecycle of any business, once profitability has been reached at full capacity you would consider expanding - and that is probably going through everyone's mind at the moment.

The Jefferson Street homepage is unique because among other things, it offers a virtual tour of the brewery.  I'm thinking there is about 200 SF committed to the operation, and likely a bit more for storage and other activities.

The photos I have included are the boiler and mash kettles (copper colored) and the fermentation tanks. In that second photo, you can see the bucket on the floor in the bottom right corner - a sign that primary fermentation is underway on a new batch.

Between our 2010 and 2013 trips to Lynchburg, I've been able to enjoy a couple of brews from here - and the restaurant is good, so we'll look forward to another trip sometime.  Meanwhile, I have a growler from there now as a souvenir.

The web page is here:  http://www.jeffersonstreetbrewery.com/about.php

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