Can Beer Make You Smarter?

If you drink it while reading this, then yes.

I'd like to think the same applies to this post.

So crack open a cold one (or, as John prefers, a semi-chilled-but-still-kinda-warm-one), sit back, and enjoy - and learn :)

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A few weekends ago, John and I took a kid-free trip (thanks, Nana!) to Fort Collins, Colorado for a brewery-tour weekend.  Fort Collins boasts a bevy of breweries which has always been very tempting to my beer-loving husband. Originally the trip started out as a surprise birthday gift for the hubs...which was delayed a few months due to Colorado State University's graduation weekend interfering with my plans (how DARE! :)  May...July...no matter to us - we still had a good time.

BrewFun Day 1:

The Sunday before our mini-vacay, I told John about our upcoming adventure.  He immediately began planning every brewery he wanted to tour and/or imbibe from.  First on the list, a stop in Longmont (on the way to Fort Collins) at Oskar Blues.

We started by enjoying a late lunch at the Oskar Blues restaurant:

John, happy as a hop about starting his brew weekend.

His first flight of beers.
I didn't know what a flight of beers was until then.
Silly me always called them TASTERS.  How embarrassing.

From there, we headed down the road to the Tasty Weasel to get the freshest Oskar Blues beer possible.  It was their Firkin Friday special, which kinda made John's heart leap.  I didn't know what a firkin was until that afternoon - firkins and flights, learning so much already!  The Tasty Weasel's firkin was filled with a pineapple pilsner, which was actually quite tasty! 

After having a beer on-tap and on-firkin, we went on our first brewery tour.  There were only 6 of us on the tour, so it was a very laid back experience and allowed for more conversation than tour-talk - this made me be able to converse like a normal person instead of the beer-idiot I am :) 

One of the fun things about Oskar Blues is that they can all their beer. Therefore, they have the ability to can just about anything, including our ability to leave:

One is beer, one is John's keys.

For all his effort, he got his keys. 

And an owie.

After we finished the tour, we hung out for a bit at the Tasty Weasel and played some games.

I can't remember the name of this game, but I do remember that I won.

Guess who was 1st Up?

Poor guy can't buy a win, even on his belated birthday celebration.

After our fun afternoon in Longmont, we headed up to Brewery Revielle in Fort Collins (otherwise known as my friend Signe's house :)  Her husband, Jordan, is also a home-brewer, but one who has a basement with a two-tap kegerator.  You can probably guess that this makes my husband jealous. 

A few beers, a few hours, and a bunch convos later, we headed off to the hotel to rest up for....

BrewFun Day 2!

One of the Things I Never Knew about Fort Collins (as fellow-blogger Abby would say - who probably already knew this) is that FoCo is home to a very large Anheuser-Busch Brewery.  One of the Things I Never Knew about my friend Signe is that she has a connection at the Anheuser-Busch Brewery that scored us a VIP tour.

Geared in the Garb to tour A-B.

While ideally John is a craft-brew type-a-guy, seeing brewing on the A-B scale was really impressive.  Our tour guide (Signe's friend's husband, an Area Manager at the A-B plant) is also a home-brewer, so he could really talk to John and Jordan about what was going on.  After a while, all I heard was similar to Charlie Brown's teacher-speak - "wah wah wa-wah, wah wah waaaah."  But the boys were interested, fo' sho' :)

Boys being interested.
Me looking at shiny things in the background.

Ooooo!  Fast moving cans!!!
To me, this is a really interesting part of the process.
To people really interested in brewing beer, this is an annoying stop in the tour.

 

These big silos hold rice and grains.  I think.  And they pipe the rice and grains from railcars that pull directly into the A-B plant.  It's a pretty impressive set-up, even if I don't understand it.

Hops!
These are somehow used to help flavor beer.

After we discussed the gathering of all the brewing materials, we got on to the business of how A-B actually brews beer.  This is when I got really lost.

A big thing used to hold beer during one of the brewing processes.
There were..probably..4 or 6?...of these in this room.

This is a picture of the inside of one of the big silver things above.
This one stirs beer.

This one does something when it is still wort.
I think.  I could be making that up.

More importantly, this is the nice view from the room with the big silver things.

The computer operation was really quite impressive.
This room was filled with all these screens that tell someone if there are any problems in the brew process.  Neat.

After we toured that area (which was very warm), we moved onto this area (which was very cold).

Honestly, no clue. 
But there were rows and rows.  And maybe even stories and stories of these things.  Again, impressive scale.

I think all these lines and tubes look cool.  And they're all carrying stuff for beer.  It kindof reminds me of a Miniature Killer episode of CSI.

I do remember this!
This is what the hot beer goes through in order to be cooled off.  It was like a wall of heat-emitting warmth in the ice-cooler area of the plant we were touring.  Signe & I snuggled close to the wall to warm up a bit!

This the inside of the tank where the beer is kept and aged with beechwood.
A place in FoCo sells the chipped-up beechwood as mulch when A-B is done with it.  Guess who now wants A-B mulch in our yard? :)

These are all the beechwood aging cask-things.
According to our VIP tour guide, they used this area in a scene in the newest Star Trek movie.  John watched it last week and found it!

As I mentioned before, our tour guide is a home-brewer.  One of his engineers fashioned him this Ultimate Home-Brewers Setup.  The boys oogled it for longer than necessary.

Signe and I will be fighting against this for the rest of our lives.

At the end of our tour, we went up to a Head Hauncho-ish tasting room, complete with a boardroom table and fancy office chairs (oooo!  Pretty.)  Every afternoon, big whigs get together here and taste all the beer brewed that day - on Saturday, they come in the mornings.  We got to taste the leftover fruits of their morning endeavor!

The walls were lined with beer from various stages of the brewing process.
We even tasted 8% ABV Bud Light!

Before we could leave, we even had to do a breathalyzer - thank goodness Signe passed with flying colors and could drive the rest of us home :)

After the A-B tour, John and I rushed to our next scheduled tour at the New Belgium Brewery.  At NB, you don't have to buy tickets, but you do have to reserve spots for official brewery tours.  When I made the reservations in May, the first weekend available for tour reservations was July 23rd - so you can imagine that we were anxious about being on-time for our reserved slot.

It is sad when you are 4 minutes late and missed your scheduled tour reservations.

We were put on the waiting list for the next tour, and in the meantime we were given tokens to partake in free beer, wishing and hoping that we got a spot on the coveted 1pm tour.

Luckily, we made it!

Cheers!
(our first NB tour-taste - Summersault)

It was definitely interesting to see the disparity of A-B to NB.  New Belgium is the largest craft brewer in Colorado and one of the top 3 craft brewers in the US (with Sam Adams and Sierra Nevada).  So, it's "big" in its own right.  However, to put it in perspective, New Belgium brews roughly 500,000 barrels of beer a year; Anheuser-Busch Fort Collins (just Fort Collins) brews about 50 million barrels of beer a year. 

Ya, a big difference.

Only two big shiny silver things.  And smaller, at that.

See, told you they stir beer.



Look how small their beer-cooler-downer-thing is!



More beer samples, this one Blue Paddle.

More cool bottling stuff.  I could've seriously watched their bottling/production line for hours.

Being able to go on the New Belgium tour was definitely a big highlight of the day - John (and I) would've been so disappointed if we would've missed it!

And I woulda missed this shot.  That would've been a true tragedy.

After touring the two large breweries, we walked down the road to CooperSmiths to grab a bite to eat (after a morning of beer tasting, we definitely needed some food in our bellies). 

In comparison to A-B and NB, CooperSmiths is just a small brewery that only brews beer for it's own purposes.

This one room houses everything. 
Much different than the stories and stories of these at A-B and the warehouse full of them at NB.

You can't visit a brewery without ordering a flight, right?

Once we were sufficiently filled with pub food and beer, we grabbed our bikes and were off ... in search of more of the same! :)

Our cruisers.  I loved mine!  Now I totally want a cruiser.

Don't I totes look awes on my bike?

This is why I love Fort Collins:  You can cruise for beer while looking at grain elevators on one side and beautiful mountains on the other.  Perfection.

The first brewery we found whilst pedaling along the Poudre River bike path was O'Dells.

Easy Street Wheat.  Yessiree.

John enjoys yet another flight.

After O'Dells, we biked down the road to Fort Collins Brewery. 

I tried to enjoy their Major Tom's Pomegranate Wheat (no luck).

John tried to enjoy his flight.

You can tell his heart just isn't as in it as before.
Time to regroup.

It was a neat little tap room, but we needed to re-energize.  To do that, we rode our bikes back downtown to a brewery Signe had recommended (because she likes their cool logo) - Equinox.

If you can't see the cool tree, go to their website.
Signe's right - it IS a cool logo :)

Watching this fun duo - The Seers - helped us get our act together.

Er...kindof.

Signe and Jordan came and met us at Equinox and we spent the evening listening to fun music and enjoying a few brews - then to a little restaurant where we sat on the patio for dinner.  Pretty much a perfect way to end a fun day! 

John and I really loved Fort Collins - I especially loved how "country" but also "city" it was (I mean, there's a feed store downtown.  How can you not love that? :)  It also reminded me a lot of Boulder, which is where I first lost my heart to Colorado.  In my constant search for where we will move into the house we want to live in forever, the Fort Collins area definitely ranks!

So...maybe you didn't learn much from reading this post.  And if you actually know anything about brewing beer, I probably made you dumber (misinformation is still information, right??? :)   

Cheers!