Today we took a trip to the Anheuser-Busch brewery for the
Budweiser tour. I was ecstatic. I'm not sure why. I like Bud but I'm not one of those guys that decorates everything with a Bud motif. Bud is one of those American icons though. Bud beers account for 50% of the US beer market annually (a factoid we learned on the tour). That's a lot of beer. A few years ago I took a tour of the Jack Daniels Distillery.
I thought that was a better tour for the most part, the guide was some salty good old boy that looked like he had been making and drinking whiskey for decades. Our guides today didn't look like they were old enough to drink yet. Everything was kept at a distance on the Bud tour too. In Lynchburg you got to walk up and take a whiff right out of the fermenting tank. It was neat to see thousands of bottles zooming down a belt full of beer but it was a long way off.
The highlight of the tour was probably the stables and the Clydesdales. We drove to St Louis last week to take the tour and cancelled it for this week when we got to the brewery and the stables were closed that day. That's how much we wanted to see the stables. We still didn't get to see much of the horses. The campus is gorgeous, historical and well maintained. There are a few National Historic Sites on the property. And as usual the history of the company had a lot of interesting facts, the company saved itself during prohibition by making trucks and malt syrup among other things.
All in all it was a very good tour. The one thing it had over Jack Daniels was at the end of the tour there was two free samples. I had the freshest Budweiser from tap you can possibly get. It was good too. The place was like Disney World, Mecca, outer space and a little chunk of Heaven on Earth. And unfortunately the 10:00 o'clock evening news is saying that In Bev is laying off employees to "streamline" costs. A friend of mine also said the brewery in Virginia will be shutting down as well. I can't believe that a company that does 50% of the beer business in the US needs cost cutting. I would think, in a recession beer would be one of those few things that the demand actually increases. I hope they don't stop the tours to cut costs as well.
Today we took a trip to the Anheuser-Busch brewery for the Budweiser tour. I was ecstatic. I'm not sure why. I like Bud but I'm not one of those guys that decorates everything with a Bud motif. Bud is one of those American icons though. Bud beers account for 50% of the US beer market annually (a factoid we learned on the tour). That's a lot of beer. A few years ago I took a tour of the Jack Daniels Distillery. 
I thought that was a better tour for the most part, the guide was some salty good old boy that looked like he had been making and drinking whiskey for decades. Our guides today didn't look like they were old enough to drink yet. Everything was kept at a distance on the Bud tour too. In Lynchburg you got to walk up and take a whiff right out of the fermenting tank. It was neat to see thousands of bottles zooming down a belt full of beer but it was a long way off.
The highlight of the tour was probably the stables and the Clydesdales. We drove to St Louis last week to take the tour and cancelled it for this week when we got to the brewery and the stables were closed that day. That's how much we wanted to see the stables. We still didn't get to see much of the horses. The campus is gorgeous, historical and well maintained. There are a few National Historic Sites on the property. And as usual the history of the company had a lot of interesting facts, the company saved itself during prohibition by making trucks and malt syrup among other things.
All in all it was a very good tour. The one thing it had over Jack Daniels was at the end of the tour there was two free samples. I had the freshest Budweiser from tap you can possibly get. It was good too. The place was like Disney World, Mecca, outer space and a little chunk of Heaven on Earth. And unfortunately the 10:00 o'clock evening news is saying that In Bev is laying off employees to "streamline" costs. A friend of mine also said the brewery in Virginia will be shutting down as well. I can't believe that a company that does 50% of the beer business in the US needs cost cutting. I would think, in a recession beer would be one of those few things that the demand actually increases. I hope they don't stop the tours to cut costs as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment