"With the growth of the industry, small family breweries faded out of the picture. The trend of beer was away from the family table until the advent of the bottle brought it into the home again. ... Beer to sell in the bottle meant the production of a malt beverage that could stand any weather hot or cold, and hold up perfectly. Chill-proof beer is the result -- one of America's proudest contributions to the scientific history of the industry." -- Eloise Davison, Beer in the American Home
"If you are enjoying the taste of our pride and joy, the Boston Lager, then it has passed the Appraisal Test and is ready for your consumption. If you aren't enjoying it, I'd like to take this opportunity to point out our two conveniently located exits on your left." -- Tour guide, Samuel Adams Brew House, Boston, MA
This project would not be complete without a trip to a professional-level brew house to see how beer is created on an industrial scale. To that end, during my Thanksgiving break I took a trip to the Samuel Adams Brew House in Boston, Massachusetts. Many might assume, as I did, that this company (its actual name, for the record, is the Boston Beer Company) dates to the Revolutionary period--it's well-known that Founding Father Sam Adams did have a stint as a brewer, and it's quite reasonable to guess that the modern brewer that bears his name also bears some relation to his estate. In actuality, as I first learned on this tour, the company is much newer--it was founded in 1984 by Jim Koch [link] (the recipe for Sam Adams Boston Lager was developed by his great-great-grandfather in the 19th century, ironically in St. Louis rather than Boston; see this rather fawning article) and his beer brand was named for Adams due to his status as a prominent Boston revolutionary, to reflect a desired revolution in American beer. (The beer's famous logo may actually depict fellow Boston patriot Paul Revere.) From its humble beginnings, Samuel Adams has exploded in popularity, and since Budweiser giant Anheuser-Busch's sale to Belgian company InBev, Boston Beer Company is now the largest American-owned brewery.
On an overcast November afternoon, I took a journey up the Red Line and down the Orange Line to arrive in Jamaica Plain, the pretty Boston neighborhood where the Sam Adams Brew House is located. It's much smaller than I'd anticipated; as I would learn during the tour, the Boston facility is only used to develop new beers for evaluation relating to possible mass-production, to brew beer especially for competitions, and to fill kegs headed for local destinations. Brewing on a much larger scale, to fill bottles which are shipped around the world, is done at an alternate facility somewhere in upstate New York. Brewing at the Boston facility was on a small enough scale to be contained within one fairly large room.
When the appointed hour arrived, after an optional donation to a couple of local charities (I neglected to write down which ones) the tour group was herded into a rather non-descript room (the tour guide pointed out puddles of water on the floor and assured us that it was not beer and we should not try to drink it; presumably this had been a problem in the past) for a brief overview of the history of beer in general. He listed the four essential ingredients of beer -- malted barley, hops, yeast, and water--and namedropped the Reinheitsgebot, a beer purity law passed in Germany in 1516 that limited beer recipes to those four ingredients. (Yeast is not actually included in the Reinheitsgebot, but since beer will not ferment without it I think it's implied.) Since I was taking notes through this whole thing, I asked the tour guide how to spell the word "Reinheitsgebot," assuming that, since he was lecturing tourists on it, this would be trivial information to him. Unfortunately he had no idea--he guessed "rheinheizkenbought," no lie--and since this embarrassed him and took him off his rhythm a little bit, I now found myself in the unenviable position of being a researcher on a tour whose guide HATED me. Seriously, the hostility was palpable. I kept the questions to a minimum from here on out.
A few cups of malted barley were passed around. The tour guide pointed out that malted barley is edible, but cautioned us against actually eating it because that cup had been passed around to several other tour groups that day and was possibly unsanitary. He did, however, tell us that a Sam Adams brewer's working breakfast was a bowl of malted barley with a bottle of Boston Lager poured over it "like milk over cereal." Presumably he was joking. The color of beer, we learned, depends solely on the type of malt that goes into it.
Since not many people can correctly identify hops when they see them, a some cups of hops were also passed around. Hops, we learned, are also edible, but again we were cautioned against eating them on the grounds that they taste "like licking a Christmas tree." It stands to reason that, once upon a time, some brave soul both ate hops and licked a Christmas tree in order to bring the knowledge of these two acts' similarity to the world at large. I am ever thankful for this hero's sacrifice. At this point, we also learned about yeast, which due to its status as a microscopic organism was not passed around in a plastic cup. There are two types of brewers' yeast, we learned: ale yeast, or top-fermenting yeast, which ferments at 60 degrees Fahrenheit, and lager yeast, or bottom-fermenting yeast, which ferments at 50 degrees Fahrenheit. (Note, in the picture on the left, my friend's father's copy of The Complete Joy of Home-Brewing, by Charlie Papazian. It's an important source for this project and I'd highly recommend it.)
At this point in the tour we moved into the brewery proper. In this picture, the guide is standing between the lauder-tun, on the left, and the mash-tun, on the right, which also functions as a brew-kettle. These are tools that are not featured in my Beer-making Apparatus page because they weren't part of my home-brewing kit--they weren't necessary due to my use of malt extract rather than plain malted barley--so I'll break down their purpose here. In the mash-tun, the grain is steeped in water, like tea, to release the fermentable sugars hidden within. The mixture is then sent to the lauder-tun (sometimes spelled "lauter-tun") where the spent grain is separated from the liquid and then "sparged," or sprayed with water. The mixture, called "wort," then goes back to the mash-tun, where it is boiled and hops are added. The wort is then put in a "whirlpool" (it's what it sounds like) for mixing, heat-exchanged to the correct temperature (either 50 or 60 degrees Fahrenheit, you might recall), and sent off to the fermentation vessels.
These are fermentation vessels. Predictably, this is where the beer ferments. They're pretty straightforward. When fermentation is complete, the beer is sent to the conditioning tanks.
Conditioning tanks look a little something like this. The beer is aged here, for 1 to 3 weeks depending on the variety, and hops are added again for aroma. When conditioning is complete, the beer is ready to be kegged and shipped.
At this point in the tour I was informed that I would be receiving free beer. I was pleasantly surprised. Pictured: the Tasting Room, done up to look like a bar, but of course it only serves Sam Adams on tap. We were given three different kinds of beer over the course of this tour segment: Boston Lager, Winter Lager, and the elusive Spiced Dubbel. If we spilled any, we were instructed, we must apologize to everyone present for having wasted precious Samuel Adams beer. The tour guide was later forced to eat those words when he spilled some himself.
Apparently this faux bar also serves soda. My companion on this tour, Sara Powell, is not of legal drinking age, and so she was politely denied beer and offered an ice-cold bottle of cream soda instead. She was actually quite happy with this development. She hates beer. Note my notes, up there on the left.
It could be argued, of course, that serving its tour guests free beer is a blatant PR move by Boston Beer Company to attract more tour guests and thus drum up more enthusiasm for its beers, so in an effort to legitimize this portion of the tour, the guide walked us through the official Sam Adams 5-Step Beer Appraisal Process. I'll do likewise here. Feel free to follow along at home. Notable quote from the tour: "Do not worry. We will not run out of beer. We are in a brewery."
Step One is the visual test. Pour your beer into a tall glass. (NOT a plastic cup. The guide was adamant on this point.) Wipe off the condensation, then put your hand on the other side of the glass and wiggle your fingers. If you cannot see your fingers wiggle, and it is not because your particular beer is simply very dark, then do not drink this beer. It will not meet your exacting quality standards. Sam Adams lager that is too cloudy fails the visual test and is not sold due to being "out of code." Founder Jim Koch, we were told, once said that he'd rather put a person in out-of-code beer than put out-of-code beer in a person, and so it is now a yearly tradition to dunk Jim Koch in a huge vat of out-of-code beer. The first time they attempted this, our guide claimed, Koch had dressed up in an expensive wool suit for the press that were present. A wool suit is perhaps the worst of all possible swimming attire, besides perhaps a vest of weapons-grade plutonium, shorts made of barbed wire, and cement shoes. You can probably guess what happened next. Fortunately there were paramedics present, so the worst Koch suffered was the loss of a doubtlessly monstrously expensive suit, rather than his life--along with, of course, the PR nightmare that would result from the company's founder being drowned in a vat of his own out-of-code beer.
Anyway, back to the Appraisal Process. Step Two is the Aroma Test. If you look closely, you might be able to make it out on my complimentary Sam Adams beer-tasting glass. The aroma I am testing for is that of hops--you might recall, hops are reintroduced to the beer in the conditioning tanks for this exact purpose. If you cannot smell hops, your beer once again fails the Appraisal and is unfit for consumption. (If you're wondering what hops smell like, I can simplify it for you: they smell like beer.)
Step Three is the Mouth Feel test, wherein my fellow tour-takers drank some beer under the pretense of checking its carbonation level. Beer is not naturally quite as fizzy as the American public likes its drinks, so many commercial beers artificially add carbonation to their products. If your beer is not a homebrew, therefore, it should be fizzy. If it is not, this beer is simply below you. Cast it out into the wilderness.
Step Four, to the delight of all present, is the Taste Test. To summarize: Drink some beer. If it tastes funky, well, stop drinking it. This step is kind of self-evident that way. I'd question the value of including it in the Appraisal Process at all if I wasn't keenly aware that its main function was to give tour guests an excuse to drink some more beer. We were instructed to taste the beer both at the front and the back of our tongues, to give both our sweet and bitter taste receptors an equal shot at it. In this picture I am attempting to get it to the back of my mouth without choking on it.
The residue of head on my glass shows the different levels the beer was at when I paused in drinking it between tests. Note that this is a rather small glass, but it was refilled something like 4 times over the course of the afternoon. This is the best project ever. I should do this every week.
Step Five involves talking about the beer, discussing its many subtleties, and sharing the feelings and emotions that drinking it stirred up inside you. Since I'm a detached ivory-tower intellectual, I chose to take this opportunity to review my notes instead.
At this point, the guide passed around an empty bottle of Utopias, which is perhaps the least populist beer in existence. It's apparently the most alcoholic beer in the world--25% alcohol by volume, while mere mortal beer tends to hover around 4 to 6%--and comes with a price-tag to match: $150 per bottle, which is why the one they passed around here was empty. We were invited to smell it--Utopias is brewed using maple syrup, to provide a veritable feast of various sugars that drives yeast crazy, and the maple scent remains with it all the way up until consumption. The empty bottle smelled something like Waffle Crisp. The bottle is shaped to resemble a miniature brew-kettle. Utopias is illegal in 12 states.
This is the remains of a glass that once contained a full load of Spiced Dubbel. Do not attempt to locate a six-pack of Samuel Adams Spiced Dubbel in your local liquor store; you will be disappointed. As the tour guide informed us, Samuel Adams had recently had a homebrew competition, in which gifted and enterprising homebrewers sent in their favorite recipes; the Brew House would brew a batch of each of a number of finalists, and the winner among those would be mass-produced in the Sam Adams Long Shot variety pack. In addition to the general contest, there was also an internal Samuel Adams employee contest with identical rules; Spiced Dubbel was apparently the brainchild of their senior manager of operations finance. We didn't get a chance to taste the winner of the employee contest, which is apparently a cranberry-themed brew, but it must be really really good, because Spiced Dubbel is delicious. I drank two glasses of it. Couldn't help myself.
This is where my Sam Adams tour experience came to a close, at least in terms of the actual tour. Really the evening wasn't over until I was safely at home, because due to my consumption of copious amounts of free beer and my failure to make a bathroom stop before leaving, I had an extremely unpleasant subway ride home. Thanks a LOT for your stupid free beer, Sam Adams.
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