New Hampshire and Maine Breweries Tour - Part 3 (final)

My flight at Stark Brewing Company.

Today’s post will wrap up the series on the breweries we visited during our vacation last week.  As she had in May 2014, when Mary and I last visited Northern California on our vacation, she indulged my desire to make random stops at breweries we encountered along the way.  The previous posts were about well-known brewers like Anheuser-Busch and Maine Beer Company; the three I’m writing about today fall within the brew pub category:  Stark Brewing in Manchester, NH; The Liberal Cup in Hallowell, ME; and Cambridge Brewing Company in Cambridge, MA.

Stark is located at the north end of the
old mill district.

These were definitely in the random stops category, opportunities for us to take a break from the driving portions of our trips and have a sit down, local lunch.  I’d rate them all a success on that basis.  It turns out they all had their unique take on the “local” aspect of it.

Stark Brewing Company was the first of these stops.  We took a walking tour of Manchester, which has a famous mill district that has been redeveloped into a mixed-use area downtown, and the brewery is there at the north end.  Opened in 1994, the brewery rebranded as Milly’s Tavern in 1999, and recently returned to the use of the old name.  They’re currently working on adding a distillery to the operation – the installation was underway when we made our stop.

We had a great visit and the current brewer gave us a tour of the place.  Afterwards, I got a flight to sample the beers while we had a nice lunch, and the owner and staff chatted with us a bit about the operation.  Soon enough, it was time for us to get on the road.

Street scene in Hallowell, MA, home
of The Liberal Cup.

After our visit to Acadia National Park, we got on the road back to Boston on Saturday so that we could catch our Sunday flight to DC.  Once we got far enough along, it was lunch time, and we did a quick Google search for nearby breweries, finding The Liberal Cup.  Our drive there took us past the Maine State House in Augusta, by surprise, and then we found ourselves in another quaint New England town, Hallowell, which is where the Liberal Cup is located.

Their goal since opening in 2000 has been to operate as a traditional pub, albeit one that happens to have a 7-barrel brewery down at the end of the bar.  They try to make sure that there are always six or seven beers on tap, and of course they offer the typically generous portions of pub grub, which was part of our objective.  I had another flight there, very surprised to find a couple of lagers mixed in with the ales and porters!

The final stop was at Cambridge Brewing Company.  We decided to take a walk out from the hotel we were staying at to visit some familiar haunts – Mary went to graduate school there and I’ve had a few consulting projects in the neighborhood.  Things have really grown up in the Kendall area, certainly driven by the economic engine that MIT provides, and this brewery has benefited as well.

It was the end of our trip, and it was a Saturday evening, things were just getting started when we were there, early evening.  Rather than lingering over a flight and dinner, we made a quick choice about what to eat, and then I had an IPA to go with my meal.

With these three visits, we had managed to tally five breweries in all during the Vacation 2016 tour.  We missed some good ones that truly would have been good stops – Allagash and Smuttynose are among the well-known names that come to mind.  Still, I’m quite happy to have been able to check in at three categories of breweries:  Mega-international, craft production, and brew pubs; and I sampled some really good beers during all of that.

I brought back some good ideas and observations that I hope we can make part of Hawksbill Brewing as we prepare to break ground on the leasehold improvements and order our brew kitchen.  All that will start soon – we’ve got a busy summer ahead!

New Hampshire and Maine Breweries Tour - Part 2

In the tap room - beers on tap and the bar.

After our A-B tour, and a stop to visit friends in New Hampshire, we began making our way up to Acadia National Park, which was the ultimate destination for our vacation trip.  As I mentioned yesterday, Mary had agreed to indulge me on a few visits to breweries on the way, so I had set my sights on Maine Beer Company, in Freeport, Maine, as one of the stops.

When I first began homebrewing a few years ago, Maine Beer and Boulevard were among the earliest craft breweries my fellow enthusiasts introduced to me.  The emphasis on "craft" was most apparent with Maine Beer, embodied in one of the quotes on their web site:

No tours are offered, but the production brewery
is visible from the tap room.

"We told ourselves if we couldn't do things right then we wouldn't do them at all."

Boulevard, which I toured (link here) in Kansas City in December 2014, similarly demonstrates what you can do if you stay committed to your values and aspirations.

As a result, the experience at Maine Beer brewery emphasizes a number of sustainable features to the design of the building and production area - solar arrays for power, and interpretive signage to introduce and educate visitors about other green features in use.  For a consulting professional who works on real estate and facilities, like myself, these are all great features to see in practice.

This commitment and messaging continues with the beer.  There is a solid history on their web site about experimenting with hops - see this link; also here is a quote from that page that presents a  mission that any craft brewer could adopt:

Here's the flight I chose at Maine Beer
Company - four 5 oz. tulips.

"The Hop Program developed as a way to experiment with new hops and new hop combinations, and also incorporate different styles of beer.  It is important for us to keep learning and growing as a brewery, and the Hop Program allows us to do that.  Never standing still, and always moving forward are some of the goals we aim to accomplish through this series."

We can get Maine Beer in Virginia, and my local in Bethesda also offers the pint bottles.  Peeper, Lunch, and Mean Old Tom are some of the varieties I've sampled.  For my flight, I chose Peeper, Pilot 10, a tiny beautiful something, and Beer IV -  a couple of pale ales, a hoppy lager, and an IPA (Beer IV) from the Hop Program.

The beers were good, just as expected.  The crowd in the tap room was steady, but leaned a bit more on the hipster side than I might have liked, but I can't complain.  

New Hampshire and Maine Breweries Tour - Part 1

Fermentation vessels - there are four stories
of these!

Mash tuns and boil kettles.

Mary and I are just getting back from a week of vacation in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and  Maine.

While I am still getting the photos downloaded, I wanted to get started with a few blog posts from the trip - as we did during the 2014 vacation to Mendocino, Mary indulged me with a few brewery stops, so I'll start with those.  I already posted about seeing the Anheuser Busch Clydesdales, so why not begin with the brewery tour there in Merrimack, NH.

These are new ale fermemters to be installed
at the brewery.  The jacketed tanks are
stored upside down, pending construction.

Anyone who visits this brewery can get on a tour to see the high points, and I had done that before - actually this is one of two A-B breweries I've toured, the other one is in Tampa - but Mary and I decided to take an upgraded tour behind the scenes into the production areas.  But first let me detour into a personal history with Anheuser Busch.

As the team and I have been making progress on Hawksbill Brewing Company, I only recently remembered that one of my first job offers after I completed my undergrad was with Anheuser Busch.  The Tampa brewery is near USF, where I got my bachelor's degree, and I got a referral for a quality assurance spot there back in 1988.  I actually got an offer from them, and really considered taking the job, which included two cases of beer per month as part of the compensation - we learned that it's still a standard part of the package these days, too!

The A-B hops demonstration garden.

The job I took during that job search was with a government contracting firm based in Billerica, Massachusetts, not too far south from the Merrimack brewery.  During a two-week orientation trip I went up for a brewery tour on my free Sunday.  During our trip this time, I remembered how much things had changed - everything but the tasting room, that is, it was pretty much what I remembered!

One of the automation screens.

After a short overview of the history of the company (light on details of the current A-B Inbev situation, focused a bit more on the branding we Americans know so well), we went off on our tour of the plant.  They even suited Mary and me up in safety gear!

We visited the grain room, mash tuns, boil kettles, and fermentation spaces during the trip.  The vessels are typically in excess of 700 barrels, and this is a 24/7 operation, so they really go through the ingredients.  The grain bed in one of the mash tuns shown above is four-feet deep!

We also had a look at the control room and quality assurance areas.  As you can imagine, with a plant this size, there is a lot of automation.  I have a highlight photo here - there is also software that keeps an inventory of the hops on hand, and automatically compiles the hops bill for whichever recipe is being brewed on a given day.

One of the canning lines.

Part of the bottling line.

After we stopped in the fermentation room, we had a taste of Bud Light pulled right from one of the tanks.

We learned that the tanks we could see in the room were less than one quarter of all the ones in this brewery - the fermentation building is four stories tall, and each floor is essentially laid out the same way as the one we saw.

Our tour guide Katherine, along with the flight I sampled.

After all of that we checked out the bottling and canning lines.  I remembered that the team at Boulevard were particularly proud of their line, which was being upgraded when Eric and I visited.  I've also seen the line at Port City in Alexandria...but the scale of these two breweries doesn't hold a candle to what they had at A-B.  The operation stretched in both directions as far as the eye could see, bottles on one side, and cans on the other.

To close out the tour, we went down to the tasting room for some samples.  In addition to the A-B brews that everyone is very familiar with, there were some from the new acquisitions to be tried.  I selected their Red Bridge Gluten Free, Oculto (aged in Tequila casks), the Blue Point Summer Ale, and the Blue Point Blueberry Ale.

It was a good sample, and I was very impressed with the Gluten Free offering as well as the Blueberry Ale - given the scale of the brewery, it seemed that making a product like this wouldn't be economically feasible.  That's a discussion for another day, though: the impact of the craft beer industry and how this company is responding - remember that the Devil's Backbone acquisition is still fresh, and A-B was an early investor in Red Hook.

It would be easy for me, an aspiring craft brewery operator, to be negative about this company that is so dominant in the industry.  But that isn't the impression I was left with after the tour, and besides, I couldn't feel that way about them given the history and fond memories I have of them.  They have a key role to play in the beer industry, they're a true leader, even if you can't call them "craft" - and they do everything so well, there is a lot that we can learn from them.

I recommend the tour for anybody who happens to be in the area.  It's well worth the stop, and the upgrade is only $25 if you want to check out behind the scenes.