Milwaukee Brewing Company variety banners.
This past weekend my wife Lauren and I drove to Milwaukee for a wedding. Arriving Friday evening, with the wedding Saturday evening at the Schlitz Audubon Nature Center, we had Saturday morning and day to entertain ourselves in that great Midwestern City. And great it is! Our day started with a walk to Lake Michigan with our host and their dogs. Then we had lunch and coffee and a brief Bible study at an Alterra Coffee on the Lake near the Milwaukee Art Museum. We wanted to visit the museum but time constraints and the idea of spending the little time we then had indoors in an art museum when that's all we'd be able to do in Milwaukee pushed us to do something a little more authentic: visit a brewery! After a driving tour of downtown Milwaukee, UW Milwaukee, and the adjoining neighbourhoods, we headed to the Third Ward, a revitalized warehouse district, to the Milwaukee Brewing Company (abbreviated MKE).
The view from the brewing deck.
It began as the Milwaukee Ale house, a local brewpub brewing their own beers in-house to serve with their fare, and expanded to a nearby warehouse so they could brew more and package it all to sell locally. The place sells itself as very green, and is so! Check out the brewery section on their site and learn all about their green initiatives, from efficient, centrally-located building cooling, to using used fry oil from local establishments (Milwaukeeans love their fried food!) to heat their boilers, to contributing their spent grain to the Growing Power urban farming initiative for composting. This place is on the forefront of sustainability and is one of many craft/micro breweries attempting to bring great tasting unique beers to their local markets. Milwaukee may be the home to Miller and Schlitz and Pabst (nothing against those giants, I love my PBR tallboys) but people there are bringing something a little more interesting, unique, and tasty to Midwestern palates.
Lauren and I and our host Tom took the tour. It cost $7/person. The few brewery tours I've taken have been free, so I don't know if free is the norm or if a charge is the norm, but the charge was just a drop in the bucket compared to what we got. We arrived 20 minutes before the 2PM tour, paid our way, put on the silver paper wrist band, and pocketed our tokens, the first of the gifts MKE gave to its guests. This token would net the bearer a free pint at a number of local bars and restaurants. We were directed to the bar, a somewhat ramshackle-looking array of bartop and taps, with coolers for the varieties in bottles, and told we could have as much beer as we wanted.
All the beer you could drink...
Let me repeat that: for $7 MKE gives you as much beer as you want when you tour their brewery.
Technically, you get one full pint and as many half-pints (no, not Laura Ingalls Wilder) as you want, but that's basically as much beer as you want. Being respectable adults, we tried to ask for only half-pints or less so we could simply taste the brews and not schwasted in the middle of the day, but often were given 3/4 pints or so. That's ok, I like beer and wasn't driving.
So there we were, at a local craft microbrewery with as much beer as we could drink at our beck and call. One of the servers, who turned out to be our later tour guide, gave us the run down on the beers available that day. Lauren doesn't drink beer, but a milk stout named Polish Moon grabbed her attention and asked for a taste of that. A smokey, dry stout, the Polish moon was quite good, and Lauren said that's one beer she could drink (but probably no more than a few ounces). Our friend Tom said he likes Stella Artois or Heineken, so I tried to steer him toward the lighter ales and lagers available, but none of them was to his particular taste, although he did enjoy the lagers more than the ales. I tried as much as I could without going overboard. I tried a porter, an Indian Black Ale (IBA), a stout, a cream ale, a pale ale, their IPA, etc, etc... All very good. I liked some better than others, but overall MKE's brews were all top notch.
Then all silver-clad tourists were called over to one side of the brewery for the start of the tour. This was a basic safety and "respect yourself, don't drink too much and be stupid" talk, then let loose to beer up. Yes, you read right, the beer drinking doesn't stop once the tour starts. The tour is broken into several portions: general safety; grains; mash and boil; fermenting; packaging; and after each little spiel we were invited to beer up.
Malted grains: steeping on the left, for us to taste on the right.
The next stop on the tour was a brief video about the brewery and a description of malted grain, the backbone of beer. For the uninitiated, grain, most often barley, is used for beer brewing. To "malt" the grain, so that the sugar packed in the seed can be made available for our brewing use, the raw kernels are sprouted, then halted with heat, and treated with further heating. The amount of time the kernels are allowed to germinate, the amount and source of heat used, and any further heating all lead to different malts, and hence different flavor profiles of beer, all from the same base grain! Our tour guide, Jeremy, passed around a plate of three malts for us to taste: the first probably a plain pale ale of pils malt; the second maybe a low lovibond number malt; the third a smoked or chocolate malt. I've never tasted the malts I use in brewing, so this was a new and eye-opening experience. They all had the basic texture of Grape Nuts, but different flavors, and we made sure to try all three. After that we were invited to beer up again before moving onto the lautering tun and boil vessels. Each step, the mash and the boil, is carried out in separate vessels, and the wort, the sugary liquid produced by steeping cracked malt grains in hot water, is transferred between the two via pipes. As mentioned above, the spent grain is not
Grist hopper smash!
simply thrown out but given (sold?) to a local urban farming initiative for composting, and a brewery employee has to climb into the lautering tun to shovel out all the spent grains before cleaning it for the next batch. As we descended from the upper level where we learned about mashing and boiling, whence the hops are added, a giant radiator looking thing was pointed out to us. This is the wort chiller, and was pointed out to us for two reasons: one, it's an important step in brewing, you have to chill the boiled wort to room temperature or lower before adding the yeast otherwise the heat will kill or cause those living organisms to act in unwanted fashions; but two, they bought it from Shirley Jones, yes, TV's Mrs. Partridge and star of many 1950s and '60s movie musicals. What she was doing with such a device is anyone's guess, but that's from whom MKE bought it.
Peering into the fridge. More tanks inside the fridge.
More beer then on yeast and fermenting. MKE has a large walk-in fridge for lagering (whose yeast needs colder temperatures to ferment) and bottle conditioning, and the vessels were labeled with things about taxes, which we were told was an explanation relating to Prohibition that was too long and complicated for Jeremy to get into right then. The interesting thing about their large fridge space is that the heat exhaust is used to heat the water used in the brewery. Way to be green MKE!
Fermenting yeast bubbles!
One more beer refill before the final step of the tour: packaging. We were shown another short video and given an oral description of the bottling and canning of their beers. Yes, you read that right, canning. Even though the dark brown bottle is the mainstay of craft beers, cans are apparently a better container. They're easier to recycle, cheaper to produce, and less prone to shattering in your backpack while hiking. While bottles are easier to label since you can slap any sticker on a bottle, the craft can are better overall, so we might be seeing cans slowly take over the bottle for your favorite microbrews.
Our tour guide Jeremy and the packaging area.
We could have stayed and drunk more for a half hour longer, but we had to get back to our host's house to clean up and head over to the wedding. We had a great time at MKE, our friend Tom had no previous concept of brewing so he asked a lot of questions and learned a lot, and I enjoyed several new beers. Another brewery tour notched on my belt.
What breweries have you toured? What's your favorite brewery and favorite part of a tour?
Until next time beer friends, happy brewing!
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