Adventures in New Glarus, WI

The gorgeous new Hilltop, New Glarus Brewery (in the town of the same name) Wisconsin.

The beautiful new brewing facility allows visitors to wander about, taking a self-guided tour at your leisure free of charge, and without getting in the way of the brewing in progress.

As you enter the brewery, you get a glimpse into New Glarus' brewing prowess and a little history of the brewery. Above: The many medals the brewery has won are proudly on display.

The brewery is complete with their own waste treatment facility at the bottom of the hill.

Happily, many breweries are taking steps to reduce or reuse their waste in ethical ways.

You know, like monks have done for centuries. Feed your left over yeast to your livestock, and your grains can be composted or fed to chickens and pigs.

Beautiful and shiny copper kettles for mashing and boiling! If only we had room in our garage for a couple of these puppies (if only we had a garage :(

This place is really state of the art! SO MUCH Stainless steel and healthy yeast at your fingertips.

Guest that visit the brewery are discouraged from drooling (for sanitation purposes of course).

From the left: the Weiss beer room (separate tanks from everything else), more steel tanks whose only purpose is to make homebrewers jealous, and the "stairway to heaven" as the brewers have affectionately dub it. It seems like an alright way to die... a 4 story fall into vats of fermenting beer. Will that get us into heaven though? I think so, but consult a priest for more details before attempting this!

Check out the bottling line in action!

The tasting room/gift shop is, hmm..........well, tasty! For $3.50 you get any 3 tastes of their standards on draft or

the bottled specialty beers.

And you get to keep the glass when your done. We were lucky enough to score an extra taste from a nice women

who had had her fill, so we got to try everything.

While you sample, you can stroll around outside and enjoy the beautiful rolling green hills in the distance.

One last stop at the brewery... the "Beer Depot." We must buy some bottles for future sampling. The "Enigma Unplugged," "Golden Ale," "Raspberry Tart," "Cracked Wheat," "Moon Man," "Fat Squirrel," "Two Women," and the "Wisconsin Belgian Red."

Before leaving town, you may notice the original New Glarus Brewery (referred to as Riverside) down the road just a bit.

This humble building is still functioning today, and within its walls are GIANT wooden barrels used for

some or the breweries more "wild" beers.

As we drove out of the town of New Glarus, we were surprised to find ourselves back in Brooklyn almost instantly. Wormhole? Maybe, but this doesn't look like the Brooklyn we know?

Finally, we made it back to Chicago... to have some beer flights at the new brew-pub there, Revolution Brewing. Really delicious beers. We were happy to be back in Chicago, and not be drinking Old Style (or Molson, like we had to on July 4th)! Boy, those residents of Wisconsin are mighty kind and really do enjoy some amazing Brats! Thanks Matty!

Drunk History Presents St. Arnold, Nikola Telsa & Mark Zap

Not only is July the celebratory month of St. Arnold, Patron Saint of Brewers, but it is also Good Beer Month here in NYC! There will be several events going on all around the city, so be sure to check at least one out!

Next on the list, we wanted to give a shout out to our buddy Mark Zap and congratulate him, and his homebrew club, The New Brighton Homebrew Society out on Staten Island. They are the American Homebrewers Association's feature club of the month! Check it out here. Staten Island has a whole mess of homebrewers and we are very happy to see them getting a nod. We should also mention that Mark has been working on a really awesome project for a few months now called "Brewing As Art". Mark and a welding buddy will be building, from the ground up, a completely mobile brewery. They plan on having presentations all through the city when the project is ready. You can follow their progress here.

Lastly, we wanted to remind everybody about our new FORUM! Now anytime you have a question and need an answer, you can have a whole mess of people helping you out, including us of course. Feel free to join and participate or just browse the forum as a guest. It is of course FREE to join! We also have a new "Questions & Answers" page set up. It is simply a quick reference guide for frequently asked questions and will always be available to view on our homepage.

Next up some Adventures from New Glarus.....

The Cooking Channel? F*ck that sh#t! Pabst Blue Ribbon!

In case you didn't catch it, we had the pleasure of joining Jimmy Carbone of Jimmy's No. 43, Ray Deter of d.b.a., Dave Brodrick of Blind Tiger, Brian Ewing of 12 Percent Imports, and Spencer Niebhur from Southampton Ales & Lagers at Roberta's for an episode of Beer Sessions on the Heritage Radio Network.

We got to taste some great beer that Brian and Spencer brought with them, and we got to share a Saison and a Canadian/Belgian Cherry Ale that we brewed at home. The food at Roberta's is indeed as good as everyone says..... Awesome pizzas, and a fantastic dry-age steak!

Thanks for having us guys.

Also, noteworthy, but much less significant... we made a "subliminal" appearance on the Cooking Channel last monday night on a show called Drink Up! You surely wouldn't have noticed us, but images of our store were used for the homebrewing segment. Don't feel bad if you are confused..... blame the sloppy editing of the hopefully soon to be short-lived Cooking Channel. Blahhhh! Television leaves us with a bad taste in our mouths. Give us radio or give us death!

If you are interested in attending the Brooklyn Wort home-brew competition, and helping to choose which beer is awarded the title of Peoples Choice (and the $200 cash prize), the tickets are now on sale here! $20 for 20 3 oz tastings, thats a freaking deal! Get 'em before they're gone!

We've added some new herbs, spices, and flowers to our lineup: Rosehips, Star Anise, and Sea Salt and Anatto seed for you cheese makers.

Also, we are happy to say that we are now selling raw honey from Stockin's Apiaries in Pennsylvania, instead of getting honey from California. We can sleep better at night now.

The grain selection has grown too. We added Pale Chocolate malt, Acidulated 2-row malt, Chocolate Rye, and Special Roast.

The 3rd meeting of the Brooklyn Rot at Bierkraft was once again a success!! Delicious goat cheese, awesome pickles and lots of homebrew as always! We hope we can keep this beautiful union of all things fermented for a long time to come.

Thanks again everyone for all of the support!

Now I can't write about anything.....

Introducing the Brooklyn Wort! A competition that we announced roughly 3 days ago and has already SOLD OUT!

We apologize for the people who haven't heard about it yet, but we truly did not expect this kind of response. It's AWESOME! So even though nobody else can enter to win $1000, you can still go to the event and get drunk on 20 delicious homebrews. Tickets are set to go on sale June 1st, so mark your calendar and get the tickets before they sell out! Hopefully we will be able to add on a few more competitions in the future!

In not so great news, last years hop harvest is already beginning to get light, mainly on whole leaf hops. So many of those great whole leaf hops you have all fallen in love with (Citra....) will likely be sold out by next week and done until this years harvest.

In better news, our hops out front are looking quite nice! Please come and see them soon....

We will be taking a few days off this summer, which we will announce shortly. You can also expect to see maybe a new face or 2 around here helping us out shortly. Be nice to the newbies!

Currently we have been brewing a massive amount, trying so hard to catch up from our moving hiatus! Expect to see us with several versions of a Saison, a few Weizens, another Bohemian Lager and our first attempt at Mead w/ our delicious Orange Blossom Honey!

Speaking of Honey.... we finally have some amazing LOCAL honey! And its raw! They are in 17 oz jars and 5 lb jars!

The meeting of the Brooklyn Rot this month was a blast! We had TONS of beer, cheeses, pickled diakon, pickled mango and a very delicious carrot kombucha. We hope it continues to grow, because it has been a blast so far!

For those of you who will be out and about this Sunday, Park Slope will be having it's annual 5th ave. fair and you can come and find us there. We will be next to the Bierkraft Beer Booth selling all kinds of weirdo gadgets and stuff you have never seen before at the store. See you guys around!

Bring on The Rot.

Spring has arrived, along with lots of goodies. First off, Rhizomes are still around, and maybe for another week or 2. Right now should be about the perfect time for planting them, as long as another pesky frost doesn't come along that is..... This BYO Video will give a bit of an idea of what you will need to do,

The Rhizomes are $7 ea and are available in several varieties. We will be attempting to grow our own hops and create a mystical-dreamlike arch outside of the front of our store ( thanks to Steve Hindy for the awesome idea ). So exciting!

Next up on the agenda, our first meeting for The Brooklyn Rot will be next week, Wednesday April 7th, 8pm @ Bierkraft. This collaboration between ourselves and Bierkraft is not to be missed. Along with our normal selection of beers we will be bringing our first batch of EXTREMELY young wine, a Barolo to be exact. We hope to bring one to every meeting, and be able to taste it as it transforms throughout the months. Besides us, we hope to be trying lots of delicious offerings ( we are crossing our fingers for some homemade cheese! ). Besides all of the things people should be bringing, there is also the amazing selection of Bierkraft beers and tasty treats that will be available as always. Please join us for an evening of magic.

Lastly, we have decided to close for Easter Sunday, April 4th. We will reopen with our regular hours on Tuesday.

Thanks everyone! We look forward to seeing you in the future!