adiochiro3
Well-Known Member
SWMBO and I are visiting our oldest daughter and her husband here in San Diego, and toured Stone Brewery this afternoon. The facility is quite impressive from the bistro and the gardens to the brewery itself. Good fun, and good beer.
I've toured BMC breweries a couple of times in my younger years, and I thought those places really stink to high heaven. But not Stone; the aromas were very much like my own home brewing -- cooking wort and aromatic hops.
Ken, the tour guide is very entertaining and knowledgeable. He really encouraged folks to give homebrewing a try. He called it "God's Work." He also gave up Stone's IPA recipe that we could just scale down if we wanted to. "First, start with 5K gallons of water..." LOL!
I believe he said that the fermenters were 12K gallon, and there were a bunch of them. This was just one row of probably 6 or 8 rows -- and they plan to put more in where the bottling operation used to be (which is now next door).
I couldn't get a good picture of it, but the blow-off tube was venting so much CO2, that you could see a mirage of gas over the top of the 55 gal. drum in which it was immersed. It was like the sanitizer in the drum was boiling. He said that they complete fermentation in about 4 days because they can create ideal fermenting conditions that homebrewers cannot.
Ken also talked about aging big beers in barrels, which he thought was probably the best recent emphasis in craft brewing.
At the end, we were able to taste four beers: Levitation Ale, IPA, Arrogant Bastard, and Stone 17th Anniversary Götterdämmerung IPA made exclusively with German hops. All were incredibly different both on the nose and palate. I enjoyed Levitation and the Anniversary brew the most.
My wife is not a fan of huge hop profiles, so she did not enjoy the tasting as much as I did. To round out her day (and mine), we enjoyed a snack in the bistro which included a bottle of Imperial Russian Stout.
What a great finish to a nice event!
I've toured BMC breweries a couple of times in my younger years, and I thought those places really stink to high heaven. But not Stone; the aromas were very much like my own home brewing -- cooking wort and aromatic hops.
Ken, the tour guide is very entertaining and knowledgeable. He really encouraged folks to give homebrewing a try. He called it "God's Work." He also gave up Stone's IPA recipe that we could just scale down if we wanted to. "First, start with 5K gallons of water..." LOL!
I believe he said that the fermenters were 12K gallon, and there were a bunch of them. This was just one row of probably 6 or 8 rows -- and they plan to put more in where the bottling operation used to be (which is now next door).
I couldn't get a good picture of it, but the blow-off tube was venting so much CO2, that you could see a mirage of gas over the top of the 55 gal. drum in which it was immersed. It was like the sanitizer in the drum was boiling. He said that they complete fermentation in about 4 days because they can create ideal fermenting conditions that homebrewers cannot.
Ken also talked about aging big beers in barrels, which he thought was probably the best recent emphasis in craft brewing.
At the end, we were able to taste four beers: Levitation Ale, IPA, Arrogant Bastard, and Stone 17th Anniversary Götterdämmerung IPA made exclusively with German hops. All were incredibly different both on the nose and palate. I enjoyed Levitation and the Anniversary brew the most.
My wife is not a fan of huge hop profiles, so she did not enjoy the tasting as much as I did. To round out her day (and mine), we enjoyed a snack in the bistro which included a bottle of Imperial Russian Stout.
What a great finish to a nice event!
