Sam Adams Brewery

I went to Boston the other day for a little weekend getaway with some friends.
As New Yorkers, there's always a little bit of rivalry between the two cities, but all things aside, we definitely had a great time up in Beantown.

I've been traveling quite a lot lately and through my travels, I've met some pretty cool people.
One of these "really cool people" happens to be a Sam Adams employee in Boston and offered to take my friends and I on a private tour of the brewery.

So we set a weekend to go up to Boston and check out what the city had to offer.
It was Sunday and the brewery was closed. Convenient. We met T (the brewer) up around 4pm at the loading dock of the brewery and into the building we went.

It smelled of yeast, barley, hops.... everything you thought it would smell like.
Really good beer was being made here and I was about to have me some.

Once entered, T took us straight to the bar and poured us some seasonal beer on tap.
I asked for a glass of the Holiday Porter.
As many of you know... Sam Adams offers a myriad of seasonal beers along with their standard Lagers and Ales.
Considered a Craft Brewery (bigger than a Micro Brewery, smaller than a Mega Brewery), they pump out only 0.7% of all domestic beers in America. Just 0.7%. To put this in perspective, Budweiser controls 52% of the market share in the US.
(Holy F! is right)

So our tour starts at the tour center... pictures, old bottle designs and medals from all over the world decorate the visitor center. Tons of "Best Beer" awards, tons of medals, tons of awards.... you get the point.
But what we wanted to see were the brewing tanks.
And so into the back we went.

Quite a magnificent site. You can't help but smile knowing there's tons of goodness resting in those steel containers.
At the Boston site, they are only able to produce 70,000 barrels of beer a year. It's more of a front really. That's just fractions of their annual 1.2 million barrels, which are produced in Cincinnati and other off-site breweries.

"Anheuser-Busch literally -- literally -- spills more beer than I make all year," he says. "They make 100 million barrels and they lose 1.5 percent to just spillage in the breweries." - Jim Koch, CEO

At this point in the tour, I thought we were about to wrap up. But T really out did himself and took us into several of the back rooms where they kept "the special stuff".
Breweries always have special stuff for employees and "friends". And the phrase "sharing is caring" couldn't be more true.

T poured us a glass of Sam Adams Utopias.












(left: Utopias from the bottle into a snifter. right: unfiltered Utopias straight from the fermentation tank)
For those in the know, this is a beer only offered every 2 and a half years. The next commercial batch is to be unveiled mid 2009.
- 26% alcohol per volume, this is the strongest beer in the world
- Bock style beer
- Use of all 4 Noble Hops
- Caramel and Vienna Malts
- A variety of yeasts are also used (including champagne yeast)
- Aged in whiskey barrels

This was possibly the most amazing beverage my palate has ever come across. Amazingly deep, floral, complex, smooth and ultra delicious. Not very beerlike but technically still a beer.

This trip definitely changed my thoughts on beer and has even motivated me to buy some books on home brewing. I will attempt to brew with my friend this summer and will surely post once we are ready to sample.

Cheers!