A few weeks ago I visited the Brooklyn Brewery. It was a Sunday afternoon and I was on the first tour of the day. Upon entering the brewery, the security guys gave my boyfriend and I free tour tickets and told us that we can go have a drink while we wait. We purchase these cute little Brooklyn Brewery tokens that we then exchanged for some beer.

The tokens, beer and tour tickets

The guys who were serving the beers in the tasting room were very knowledgeable due to the fact that they help making the beer on days that the tours are not in session. They told me that they get their hops and barley mainly from Washington and Oregon, depending on where its best at season. They also asked my boyfriend and I what beers we typically drink so that they can recommend the best tasting beer for us which was very helpful. I tried the Brooklyn Lager and my boyfriend had the Winter Lager. Something that caught my eye was that their cups were made from plants (it said so on the cup) which made them environmentally friendly.

The label stating that the cup is made out of plants.

They also had a food cart inside that apparently they change out every week to allow people to try new types of foods while visiting the tasting room. When our tour started, we were allowed to take our beers with us to enjoy while the tour guide told us about their process of making beer. The tour guide started off by asking if anyone knew what the four main ingredients of beer were and I was given a free beer token for answering the question. The four main ingredients are malt/barley, water, yeast and hops. A fun fact that she mention was that hops are a 1st cousin of the marijuana plant. The barley is guided up and mixed in with hot water, it soaks together and creates what is called a mash. That mash is then sent to a lauter tun in which the mash separates into hot and sweet liquid and the grain. That hot sweet liquid is called the wort which is unfermented beer. The wort is then sent to the brew kettle, after the liquid boils, the hops are added for flavor, aroma and also for the beer to preserve better. When that process is over, the liquid is sent to the fermentation tanks and fermented in different ways depending on what type of beer they want to make; a lager or an ale.

The fermenting tanks

After the beer is made it is then either legged or bottled. However all their canned beer and Lager is made in upstate, Utica, NY because those are 60% of their sales and the brewery doesn’t have the space capacity or equipment in the brewery itself to make that much beer. The brewery in Brooklyn actually makes about 1/3 of their beer like their seasonal and special flavors and the factory in upstate makes the other 2/3.

The beer menu in the tasting room

A fun fact is that when Brooklyn Brewery first started off it didn’t even have a name and it was just beer being made out of a house by Steve Hindy. Steve then partnered up with Tom Potter and they decided to make a brewing company. When they were coming up with a logo they wanted so many different things on it but didn’t have any money. They asked Milton Glaser, the creator of the I<3NY logo. It took them a while to even get an appointment with him, but after hassling his assistant for weeks she finally gave them and appointment to see him. He offered them a very simple design (the design that we know now) and asked for a percentage of the company in return and as well as free beer for the rest of his life. He still gets free beer to this day. That is how Brooklyn Brewery began as a company.

More tanks with the Brooklyn Brewery Logo