Fair Winds

Beers in the fridge:

Patagonia Weisse, looked like home made lemonade, cloudy. Very refreshing, would help pass away a summer evening in the Estate Garden quite well.


Saw this Toad in the hole on the web

Not sure how to construct it but am putting on my thinking cap.

Fuller's Brewery Tour 2010

While in London for the Eldest's Graduation back in 2010, we had the chance to visit the Fuller's Brewery.

As it turned out we had a personal family tour, the tour guide, John and the 3 of us. The tour guide was an ex-employee.

 Here is the tourguide in his yellow safety vest and our eldest whose back you may recall from other Past Trip posts.

We were first given an overview of the making of beer and then a look at some of the older equipment no longer used. The brewery uses so much water that they draw local water overnight to a huge tank for the next day's beer making, so as not to affect local residents while they are taking their morning showers.

Antique tub for heating the wort.

 Special reserve ales are aged in casks, we bought a few to try.

 There were 2 keg filling lines, one manual and one automatic.
Manual.
The guys fill the kegs, someone pounds in a plug, they stack up the kegs and a guy takes the stack to the warehouse. The guys get coffee breaks, in the old days the workers got beer breaks.

Automatic.
Robot puts empty kegs onto the line, they get filled, it takes them back off after they are filled. It gets no coffee break. The kegs take the conveyor belt at bottom left, go to the background of the photo and through the machine that cleans, fills and plugs the keg.

You can make out the orange robot in the upper third of the photo, it was removing the filled casks from the line and stacking them up for a human fork lift operator to move to the warehouse.

Brooklyn Brewery

Finally had the chance to visit the Brooklyn Brewery with the whole family.

We waited outside in a long line at first to get into the tasting room.
Then while we waited in the tasting room for our tour to start we sampled

• a Wheat
• a Pilsner
• a Half Ale
• a Black Chocolate Stout, I have had this in bottle before and like it better on tap.

Not all liked them all, but I thought they all were good.

 The Company logo was designed by Milton Glaser (the I heart NY guy) for stock in the company and free beer.
The tour covered 2 areas and provided an overview of the beer making process and some history about the founders

 Creating the wort and Fermentation/bottling

 They make a Cask conditioned ale, Brooklyn Best Bitter which is only served in the tasting room and sometimes at April Bloomfields's restaurants, The Spotted Pig and The Breslin. I didn't notice it on the Tasting Room Beer list, but could have missed it, they serve a large assortment of beers. I would have liked to try the Bitter.
Maybe we will go back because there is a longer tour on weekdays (M-Th) for which you need to make reservations.

Different sized fermenting vessels.

Special Bottling machine, one of just a few in the world.