Brewery Tours and Beer Memories

I’m not a morning person but I was up and in the shower by 8:30 on Thursday. I had a tour bus to catch and thanks to the gods of good weather there was no new snow in between me and the senior center where the bus was waiting to take us to a craft beer brewery and tap room. Before this week I could count on one finger the number of beers I’ve drank in my entire life…actually it wasn’t even a full beer. I didn’t like the taste and I never tried it again. It just didn’t make sense to waste calories on trying to acquire a taste for beer when they could be put to better use on mint chip ice cream.  I had a decade long love affair with that creamy, green stuff.

The night before the tour I did my research and learned this particular brewery makes a beer called Kentucky Breakfast Stout that is brewed with chocolate and coffee, two of my favorite things so that was the beer I set my sights on trying it with lunch. It’s been named the 4^th best beer in the world. This brewery---along with all the start-up micro-breweries that have popped up in recent years---has put West Michigan on the map for beer aficionados.

I didn’t expect to be impressed but the place was amazing and it covered an entire city block. The tour took almost two hours and the tour guide was funny along with being informative. We learned everything there is to know about making and bottling beer. There, they age their higher end craft beers two to five months in wooden bourbon barrels stored down in the local gypsum mines (accessed from their sub-basement) and the barrels can only be used once. They go through 9,000 wooden barrels yearly and after they use them, the barrels are shipped off to Scotland where they take them apart, plane the inside surfaces and put them back together again to use to age Scottish whiskey. Who would have ever guessed that?

The automated bottling line of the brewery can fill 500 bottles a minute and we got to watch the process in action from cat walks. The place was super clean with stainless steel machines and vats everywhere you looked. The floors were brick red ceramic tiles and every section we went to had a different aroma. We were told at the beginning of the tour that we couldn’t touch anything made of stainless steel and silly me, I said, “I guess that means we can’t lick anything either?” The tour guide laughed, pointed a finger at me and replied, “You’re the one I’m going to have to keep a close eye on!” I love it when young people get my sense of humor.

The tour ended in their huge tap room where we had lunch and got a free beer---they have three or four smaller tap rooms around the brewery for the employees and a happy bunch of people they were. I only drank half of my beer because, apparently, my tastes in beverages hasn’t changed in the last 50 years. I felt bad about wasting beer that is so highly sought after and only available part of the year but I couldn’t make myself finish that pint. I’m a beer drinking failure. My mom didn’t drink beer or liquor at all but she had a better reason for abstaining than I did. Her father, brother and one brother-in-law often drank up their paychecks, leaving their kids with little to eat. In her late teens when Mom was a waitress her dad would come collect her paychecks and she’d never see a penny of it because he’d head to the tavern next. And I grew up seeing my mom slipping folding money to her sister to buy groceries. I’m not sure if my dad ever knew it but if he did he probably would have understood. According to family folklore he had tried to “talk some sense” into the three drunks in the family who didn’t know their limits when it came to drinking. 

When Don and I first met it was springtime and he didn’t know his limit either but by fall he gave up drinking all alcohol and he never looked back. He got his wake-up call when he ran into the back of a parked car and spent the night in jail. That didn’t stop us from going to disco bars and places with live music. I had wine and he’d have a Coke. Someone in the last years of Don’s life ask him if he’d want to have a beer again if he knew he would die within a few weeks. I was surprised to hear him answer, “Yes.” After the first five years of his sobriety I had quit worrying about a relapse. He would have loved the tour I went on but I’m not sure how he would have felt about my seatmate on the bus. When she sat down she said, “I wasn’t sure I was going to make it today. I spent all day yesterday crying.” It was the twentieth anniversary of her husband’s death and she said it hit her hard. I imagine it was the two decades thing that got to her. I’m not sure. At some point I quit listening because the voice in my head was talking louder and it was saying, Please tell me that’s not going to happen to you! ©