Greetings From Michigan, A Great Beer State: Stop #3 - Bell's Brewing Company

No proper beer trip to Michigan would be complete without a stop at Bell's Eccentric Cafe. On our way in the door, I noticed that I had a message on my phone, and just as soon as we walked in the door, we were right back out on our way to the Bell's production facility (Thanks Bob and Marty!). Their facility is normally not open for public tours, so this was an extra special treat for us.

Driving up to the building, you get the sense that Mr. Bell is not fooling around. The building is a massive steel structure tucked between a couple buildings and a couple fields just a few miles out of town. This location works well for them because that means they have some more room to grow in the future. And that is a good thing for all of us.

We've got a lot of photos, so I'll mostly let them speak for themselves.

The control board in the photo, while functional, is not generally used in production. The brewer runs the operation from a computer room.

We don't know exactly what's in here, but we hear it might be sour! I for one am super excited about that prospect.

There are a lot of green updates to this location, including solar lights, motion detector lights, and a grass rooftop. The barrels on the left are supported by an overhead grid. This allows for easy access for the workers as well as the hoses and other brewing equipment.

This machine washes, sanitizes, and fills the kegs.

This shelf holds beer from previous batches they've brewed (no 9000 yet, we asked) so if they run into any issues, they can check it out. They take quality control seriously here!

The bottling line fills and packages Expedition Stout.

This was my favorite stop on the tour - the lab.

Bell's Eccentric Cafe is located about 5 miles from the brewery. It's a giant room with beautiful details in wood and brick. You can order beer at the bar and food at the small window to the right of the bar. Notice the 76 Ale sign hanging on the wall? It comes from the old Terre Haute Brewing Company.

Mike had the Rye Stout, which is something brand new to bottles. The flavor in front was a deep roasted malt with coffee flavors, also kind of like toasty bread. The rye comes through in the middle, and the beer finishes with a full coffee flavor again.

I had the Golden Funk, a 6.5% ABV Sour Ale. The board said it had peppercorn, galangal, and cardamom. I've never heard of galangal before, but wikipedia says it's a root that is used in some Asian dishes. The beer is floral and sour with a funky medicinal flavor. Mike said that the nose reminded him of ketchup flavored potato chips, but I mostly just got a lot of floral notes. It's very interesting and I hope this is just the beginning of their sour offerings.

A Journey Into the Heart of Darkness

Saturday morning, after a City Cafe breakfast and another woefully unbearable match by the Fulham Football Club, Gina and I headed back to our old St. Louis area homes for the holidays. After wasting Saturday away between the drive back and the lack of options in our tiny hometowns (Trenton and New Baden IL), we hoped to make a better day of Sunday. Thanks to a suggestion from my mother, we did just that - we spent the day drinking.

We started our Saturday in the heart of American beer consumption - on the Anheuser Busch St. Louis brewery tour.

As a veteran of a few small brewery tours, this was quite a different experience. We started our tour in a small museum, which featured different kiosks for the history of Anheuser Busch brands. Because we arrived just as the tour was starting, we didn't dally; We walked over and started listening to one of our two tour guides, who was busy rattling off a series of facts about Adolphus Busch. These facts were thrown out in a rapid-fire method - best to get them out of the way - before the commonly-known announcement (at least to St. Louis residents, anyway) was made - this tour would include free beer.

We walked out of the museum and into the cold outdoors, where we were shown a Clydesdale, eating from a fenced patch of fresh hay and standing directly in front of a tractor trailer advertising the Budweiser brand. After a few horse facts we were lead into one of the three national landmark buildings on the tour - the stables for the Clydesdales. After another series of facts about the horses, we were given the option to advance directly to the hospitality room (with the free beer), or continue on the tour.

We continued on to a building containing the beechwood aging room, which featured holding tanks two to three stories high each, where the beechwood aging of Budweiser takes place. These tanks were in rows of (I'd guess) about 20, and double or triple stacked. If I were to guess, I'd say each one of these tanks contained the equivalent of all the beer that passes through Warbird's facilities each year, and the beer only stays in these tanks for 19 days before moving on to be bottled.

After visiting the tanks, we headed over to the Brewhouse, where we learned about the four quality ingredients in Budweiser - Hops, two-row malt, four-row malt, and "to give it that crisp taste" - rice. After our quick beer lesson, we were taken to see the mash tanks and brew kettles in rooms as large as a high school gymnasium. As we passed the computerized control room, I couldn't help but think that the type of sitting around waiting for alarms to go that Budweiser's brewmasters do isn't all that different than the methods most homebrewers are used to.

We then left the brewhouse and headed over to the packaging facility, where we were shown a short film hosted by some very young and attractive "model" AB Employees, who told us all about AB's amazing production capacity. This seems to be the focus of the whole tour, and included a minute or two talking about how amazing Budweiser's packaging was.

After we left the packaging facility we finally made our way to the hospitality room, where we sampled the rarest things we could find on tap - a highly agreeable, highly drinkable stout by the name of "Mule Kick" - it wasn't listed under any particular Budweiser brand, so I'm not sure what they've got planned for this one. I also tried the Bareknuckle Stout - a Guiness rip-off that was a poor follow up to the Mule Kick. I tried a sip or two of a Belgian White called "Shock Top", which looked to be packaged in a way similar to AB's Spring Heat Spiced Wheat from earlier this year.

All in all the tour was pretty fascinating, but as a beer geek I found myself wishing they had focused more on the actual beer - perhaps not such a strange feeling, considering the brewery.