somewhere along the tour, when a fellow tourist asked where all the workers were, i replied that the oompa loompas had the day off. they didn't get the joke, the philistines, but it was fitting. the budweiser WHQ in st. louis MO certainly has the look and feel of the mythical wonka factory, right down to the areas where we weren't allowed photography (not, imho, because we might snap a shot of the secret ingredient to the everlasting budstopper, but because we might expose aging budweiser to harmful light and thus give it some flavor, any flavor at all, even if it's skunky, oh geez let it have some flavor!!! sorry).
anyhow, the first thing I saw was this magnificent building, apparently a Barley Cleaning House:
in st. louis, many buildings are old-school brick, the sort you never see in CA for reasons that are evident to anyone who's lived in CA for any length of time (hint, as if any of you aren't living in CA right now: it's because of the big bad wolf). because of all the brick buildings, many of which were also quite tall (see above, re: buildings in CA), the factory had a magical, quaint appeal to it which probably went unobserved and unimagined by others in our group more used to tall, brick, old-looking buildings.
right on the way in to the entrance was this:
way to go, guys! huzzar! keep those fingertips and noses out of your fine product!
so, we dilly dallied in the lobby as we waited for our tour to depart. right there in the lobby was the secret recipe for their flagship, with one *big secret* left out (which will be revealed in a moment):
i didn't have time to shoo the gits away, so there it is. i also didn't have time to read the details on how rice improves their beer, i had to wait until the free sample to experience it for myself. more on that, too, in a bit!
as we exited the tourgroup pooling area, the fresh (cold!) air brought with it a very familiar odor: boiling wort. it was fantastic. boiling wort, along with roasting coffee, are two aromas that are always welcome to me. i've tasted beer i didn't like, but i've never smelled a boiling wort i didn't like.
i sniffed hard (eyeing the clydesdale stables that we were approaching, realizing that my sniffing opportunities would soon cease) and thought i could even smell some hops. yum, and yum.
to our right, as we approached the horses, was an entrance. what's not to like?
the horses, of course, of course, were big. and smelly. and pissed off about being in a smallish pen. probably cold, too, as i was. who can say? we looked at them, and then went into the indoor stables, and heard some junk about them. honestly, if i wanted horse, i'd go to mexico and order a taco. i was there for beer. move on!
staged photo-op relating to horses somehow:
back outside, we saw pipes, smokestacks, clocktowers, oh my!
as we approached the lagering room, we stood next to what i guessed to be a maltings floor. there was the sound of Small Bits Of Things Moving, like beans in a coffee roaster, which i have heard before, or dried barley being moved about a floor, which i have never heard before. there was a wonderful smell of roast barley, but that my have been from a brewpot. there was also a pipe with a cloth around it, the sort of thing a truck would drive up to and have stuff come out of into the truckbed. like the coal spouts for old trains.
anyhow, we're standing there outside the lagering house, being told that we're not allowed photography once inside, surrounded by the thick smell of boiling wort and/or malting barley, and Doofus #1 behind me says to his friends, "wow, smell those hops". i sniffed. i snuffed. i strained my imagination and checked my references. barley: yes. hops? no. methinks the lad was confused.
inside we got to stand near enourmous lager tanks. there were about 4, i think, but they were also stacked 4 stories high and many rows deep. they each held about 10,000 six packs of america's largest selling beer (that's what the sign said: america's largest selling beer. largest? what?). inside was the secret ingredient: strips of beechwood. the beechwood, the tour guide said, attracts yeast sediment, naturally filtering the beer. inside the lager tanks, said the tour guide, the yeast produces carbonation, naturally fizzifying (uh, my word, not hers) the beer. wow, bud sure is all-natural! i wondered to myself whether the beechwood contributed sugar to help revive the yeast. myself, i'm more of an ale brewer, so lager yeast may behave differently, but when i want to carbonate beer naturally, i have to add more fermentables to arouse it from its slumber.
i asked hops whether she thought the beechwood contained sugars that roused the yeast to carbonation force. she didn't know, and i told her she ought to ask the tour guide if they add sugars of any kind into the lager tanks to rouse the yeast.
Doofus #1 (note to readers: i do not mean to set you up to hope for the appearance of a Doofus #2. There really wasn't one, unless you count me when I ordered my second (and third) beer, which we'll get to later) must have overheard us, because he turned around to offer his expert opinion.
"The hops have sugars in them for the yeast," he sagely advised.
Hops would have none of this, and assumed a fighting stance. "Actually," she said, "they don't."
This bold, unelaborated statement of fact seemed convincing enough for Doofus #1, as he backpedaled to save face before his pals. "Well," he said, quoting almost verbatim from the informative but un-detailed signs he evidently read in the lobby, pre-tour, "the hops give the beer its distinctive flavor and aromas."
hops wasn't going to let him continue to spout bullcrap, but i wanted to get on with the tour so i poked her in the back to signal that doofuses will be doofuses and engaging them in doofusery helps nobody. i think there were some more words exchanged regarding rice giving the beer body or some such claptrap. we moved on. we asked the tour lady our question about sugars, and explained that i was a home brewer, and told her about priming sugar, and so forth. she revealed that she was just a tour guide and not a brewing scientist. she didn't know from priming sugar.
after the lagering tanks, it was back on in to photography land. we stood in a little presentation area (also, i think, a national historic landmark because fritz busch or someone died there or took a leak in the restroom or something) and the tour guide blazed through the brewing process, as illustrated by the following photo, at blistering speed:
i am certain that nobody was entirely illuminated by her speech, but perhaps interest may have been sparked and a homebrewer or two born. she knew phrases like "primary fermentation" but knew not really what they meant. meh.
as the tour group crammed into the elevator, hops told the guide that hops in the glass display case were painted green. the tour guide was startled and replied that hops are naturally green. hops agreed but pointed out that the ones on display were picked, dried, and thus naturally brown. the green color they had was (upon minimal inspection) clearly paint. the guide took a close look and agreed. i guess even tour guides can learn something every once in a while.
they held the elevator for us (they had to, on account of we had the guide, har!) and we crammed in. upstairs, we got to see the real action: mash tuns, and brew kettles, and plumbing, oh my!
the brew kettles were undergoing a cleaning cycle, it seemed. steam was billowing around inside them. yum!
we climbed some stairs and got to peer into The Control Room, filled with fake computers and SAG nerds. if you look closely you can see john travolta in the back, hacking into NSA networks. uh huh.
then, it was back outside for more impressive brick buildings and wonkalike gates:
one of the funniest things not shown in this photo is the emblem of the busch "bread yeast" that was sold during prohibition. in the pre-tour lobby there was a display of the non-alcoholic products sold during prohibition, including anheuser-busch malt syrup (for "baking") and anheuser-busch "bread" yeast. the tour guide made note during the tour, right before i took that picture, of the "non-beer" products sold by AB during prohib. she mentioned 2 of the three non-water ingredients for beer without batting an eye.
pictured here is <name-i-don't-recall>, the AB mascot of "non-beer" products during prohibition. that's not a sandwich he's eating.
what do you reckon gets canned inside this building?
if you said "employees", you win the prize:
also, "budweiser" would have been accepted. the canning/bottling lines were the second no-photos area, so i have no photos of them. it was quite a dingus, the canner. they had several floors of canning/bottling/kegging machines, with impressive robots and beer-stank. the touring cannery was shut down for maintenance, so they took us into THE FORBIDDEN ZONE where actual, non-touring canning was going on. i saw Natural Ice being canned, which is favored by my brother-in-law for reasons i cannot understand, if it's anything like michelob ultra, which i'll get to in a moment.
german beer has four ingredients. budweiser has five. here's one of them:
we ended up in the tasting room, where, to budweiser's immense credit, we were served samples in actual glasses (a set of which i later purchased, because they are actually really nice glasses). i ordered, of course, a budweiser. we were to get 2 samples each, and hops said i could have most of hers. she ordered a "belgian white".
the belgian was rather flavorful, with orange peel and the usual suspects for a WIT (i guess AB figures americans can't figure out that wit == white, so they translate it for us. speaking of AB figuring stuff about americans, at the beginning of the tour, they told us that Mister Busch decided to call his beer budweiser because a) german-americans would like the german name and thus drink it, and b) non-german-american americans would be able to pronounce it). however, since it was, in fact, a bud, it was the boringest wit i've had, and i've only really ever had 3 or 4.
but, to the bud: as you may or may not know, this was the first budweiser i've ever had (i am pretty sure the beer-sip i got as a kid was a michelob, which, as it happens, is also a budweiser brand, but still not THE KING OF BEERS. btw, i hated that sip. bleh). excitedly, i sipped from my tasting glass before i even got to my table. it was all right! i was surprised!
there was a toasty finish, which i dig. there was a fair hint of hops -- not just bitterness, either, but an earthy, grainy, hop aroma. now, it wasn't at the level of a seirra nevada celebration ale (which i had, for the first time, about 5 days later, oh dang, that's good!) and it wasn't at the level of, say, a westmalle, which isn't a sierra nevada, and isn't even really "about" the hops but still manages, with an overseas shipment, to boot, to have a delightfully fresh hop aroma. no, it was none of these, but it was fresh hops and i tasted it.
i had read that budweiser intentionally (everything in a bud is intentional, right? those guys are control freaks and scientists) cultivates acytaldehyde in their brew, and as i aspirated it, i could taste the green-apple flavor that earned me so many dings against my tripel. to round it all out, there was a bit of malty maltyness in the beer. it was cold, it was crisp, somewhat flavorful, and had a neutral finish.
i liked my budweiser!
i downed it quickly and went back to the bar. there were lots of choices, some of which were craftyish, but i was there for the classics. i wanted a michelob to compare to the bud, since michelob was supposed to be even more premium than THE KING OF BEERS, at least, according to the ad copy in the lobby. so i looked at the different michelobs that they offered, and ordered a michelob ULTRA, since, after all, what could be better than the ULTRA BEER. also in the running was a budweiser SELECT, since SELECT means "best" and how can you do better than the "best" of the KING OF BEERS?
i got back to my table and gagged up a spleen. holy crap was michelob ultra awful.
it turns out, dear reader, as i am sure you already knew, that michelob ultra is not, in fact, the BMW of beers, but rather a light beer no-carb entry! egads, was it awful. it was like drinking seltzer water. seriously, the dominant flavor was CO2 gas. what? who would drink this stuff? it contained no alcohol to speak of, had no flavor, color was disgusting, and tasted like seltzer. why not just get a seltzer? maybe in a bar the seltzer is more expensive than michelob ultra? i know not.
hops went back and ordered a michelob "amber bock". the name is a bit redundant, but i guess you have to be when marketing beer to americans. of the 4 beers i tried, the bock was certainly the most heavily flavored, with a strong hop bitterness and fair amount of aroma. i can't say with certainty that i've ever had a bock. i've had a fair share of dopplebocks, though, and if we assume that a bock is a weaker dopplebock, then the michelob bock sucked. it's a weak offering in the category, with little to distinguish itself from the budweiser besides somewhat more bitterness and color. the maltyness of a dopplebock was pretty much absent.
overall, of the four i had, i enjoyed the budweiser the most. of the other three, i'd rather have a seltzer than a michelob ultra, i'd rather have an optimator than the "bock", and i'd rather have anything from any part of belgium than the wit. but there's nothing else like a bud.
we sat briefly with another couple and it was revealed that i was a home brewer. they asked (dunno why) if people can drink unfermented wort. i told them what i knew, which was that not only can people do it, people do do it, and that just a month ago i'd had a jamaican bottled unfermented wort called "malta".
exiting the serving room, i visited the men's room, and as i whizzed away my free beer, i thought to myself: this goes straight back to the lagering tanks.
from there we went to the gift shop and dropped a load. most expensive free beer ever.
later that night, we went out to dinner at a crummy chain seafood place a couple blocks from the hotel and no more than 2 miles from the budweiser world headquarters.
i ordered a budweiser. my second ever.
it was a true bud. tasteless, but not tasteless enough to hide the soggy cardboard. no hop flavor whatsoever and just minimal bitterness. carbonation was off. it was awful, and hops confirmed for me that it was much more like "a budweiser" than what i'd had in the brewery.
as dinner arrived, i realized the appeal of the true budweiser: it goes with food like a flavorless sprite. it clears the palate, washes bits of shrimp from between the teeth, and sparkles nicely beside the plate. i'll stick to water.
i said to hops that i'd had my first and last budweiser on the same day. if i ever go back to st. louis, i may have another, but only if it's at the brewery.
overall, i've enjoyed 50% of the budweisers i've ever had. curiously, that's a better average than i've got with duvel, but i keep on buying duvels in the hope that someday i'll enjoy one.
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