Stephen Hinton

@shinton
19 Followers
141 Following
294 Posts
Left-handed friend of cats. Dvorak typist. Loves fountain pens, horses, photography. 🏳️‍🌈 he/him

And then you get to the part that is 110% church-of-beer!

This lovely little room is where all the natural yeast action happens. The windows open. The wood siding, a house-warming gift from another brewery, is rough and captures the wild yeast for release in later sessions.

I highly recommend the tour. Great guide, fantastic beer, awesome facility!

There are factory parts that don’t look quite as church-of-beer as the previous pictures. First up is bottling & kegging.

Second is the “funk room”, where beer infected with bret and lactobacillus are stored. Everything in there is marked red to prevent contamination.

And third is a bad angle on the huge lagering room. The horizontal tanks are the largest American-produced components of the setup. Most of the steel is German.

Poor picture, but these are some of the open fermenting vessels. There were three rooms of these to prevent cross contamination. Some beers are also fermented in closed vessels elsewhere.

The tour starts with the main brew vessels, conveniently set at ground level and below for easy access. The little one is stuffed with hops when brewing Pliny and its cousins.

The entire tour happens on a beautiful human hab-i-trail to keep us out of the way.

Yesterday we visited the awesome new Russian River brewing facility. Huge, and spotlessly clean, even though it is seven-ish years old now.
Yep, those have seen a lot of use since moving to California.

Hey, Noodler’s Ink, I appreciate that you are trying to give me good value for my money. Maybe don’t fill your (quick-drying, permanent) ink bottles all the way to the top, though. I’m okay trading a few pennies of ink for not having my fingers be blue for a week!

(The other side of my fingers are completely blue and much more impressive, but don’t post pictures of your fingerprints on the Internet, kids.)

Yum!
The Lost Abbey in downtown San Diego. Lots of non-Abbey beers, some pretty good. Probably they need to serve the daily baseball crowds.

The appetizer before tomorrow’s feast!

(Although “can opener” is probably more apt…)