Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Brewery tours: friggin' whee

The post below this is newer, but for some reason the act of posting erased this entry. Effeng blogger. Anyway, I kinda like this one, so I repasted it.

I've been on a bunch of brewery tours, of both micros and famous international-type beers. I'm here to tell you they're always waaay overrated. When you get right down to it, dumping grain into boiling water and letting it sit for a month...isn't very interesting.

Even the Guinness tour. "You're going to Dublin? OMG! You have to do the Guinness tour!" I can't tell you how many seasoned world travellers gushed about the freakin' Guinness tour. As if Arthur Guinness himself would take me, along with seven other lucky winners, around the factory in a little boat down a black-and-cream river of stout. And, one by one, each other lucky winner would do something verboten to fuck it up, and small rhyming freaks would cart them away, until it was just me and my Grandpa at the top of the brewery.

Turns out, it's a self-guided tour through the former brewery, past a bunch of old barrels and videos about how Guinness is made. The tour culminates nicely in a round glass room high atop the building, where they give you one lousy freakin' pint of Guinness, and then "hey, me boyo, why dont you hurry yer arse out of here so the next wave of American tourists has a place to stand?"

As you can imagine, touring a microbrewery is even less interesting. Usually, you're "touring" a space the size of a small apartment, while an irritated guy whose job it is to make beer, not conduct customer relations activities, points at the fermenter and says "that's the fermenter, where the beer ferments."

I guess what I'm trying to say is a brewery is like your hot neighbor's panty drawer. It's nice to see the panties serving their inteded consumer function of being removed in your presence, but much less interesting to see them just sitting, bunched up, in a drawer.

Unless you're really into that sort of thing.

-Mark

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

To each their own, I guess.

I've also been on a lot of brewery tours, big and small, and I am able to enjoy most of them. The Guinness tour was a bit sad, but for the most part I enjoy many of the tours I get to go on.

I certainly couldn't say that any more than a small percentage of the tours I've been on were uninteresting.

Like I said before; each of us are different and have different opinions. I just wouldn't want someone reading this to be dissuaded out of trying a tour since I've enjoyed so many of them.

Anonymous said...

I'm still thinking about doing the Otter Creek tour.I really enjoyed the Celis one when it was still open, but the Belgians talked the owner into giving us an extra bit of scenery. (no, not that kind. get your head out of the gutter!)