I’ve found the golden ticket!
Ahhhh….a nice way to start my week, drinking beer on a Monday afternoon. It was like getting behind the iron gates of WonkaLand, that brewery tour! Our new friend Neely and old friend Nigel Morphine from D.C. accompanied us on the tour of Anchor Steam brewery in Potrero Hill, which happens to be the very place where my favorite beer is created. At first, in the staircase it smelled kinda funny like someone’s grandmother’s ethnic dinner was overcooking, but in the museum/lobby and at the bar, it smelled like stale beer. It was there that we learned about the history of the brewery, which is mysterious, tragic, heartwarming and…half of it is made up. The true parts did make for a good story, filled with fires and earthquakes and friendship. I was impressed that the company only has 50-something employees and produces a quarter the amount of beer that Sierra Nevada produces, with no marketing and a sales team of only six.
Once the tour got started and we learned about the mashing process in the room of giant 50-year old, copper vats. It smelled like fruity blossoms mixed with last call. Everyone wore clean, pressed lab coats and white jumpsuits with beer-proof rubber boots. In every room there were immaculately clean, gigantic, loud pieces of machinery overflowing with puffs of white foam, gurgling like witches’ brew. Rubber hoses poured beer out onto the floor, down into drains in the section of the building where they were cleaning the pipes. The basement room was where the bottles danced around conveyer belts, getting slapped with labels and dropped into neat, pre-printed boxes exactly like the opening scene of Laverne & Shirley, only instead of the comical 70s duo capping the bottle tops, there was a very bored-looking androgynous youngster wearing protective goggles and earplugs.
Once we learned all we could about the process, our chipper tour guide transformed into a generous bartender, serving us a nice glass of each of the various Anchor products: summer ale, bock, porter, lager, barley wine, and holiday ale. Then we got a bonus round of our requested favorite. Joy! Chug! [hiccup] Burp! It was like my birthday! It was like Christmas morn! It was like a perfectly tipsy Monday.
To schedule your own tour, call 415-863-8350 at least 4 weeks in advance.
Once the tour got started and we learned about the mashing process in the room of giant 50-year old, copper vats. It smelled like fruity blossoms mixed with last call. Everyone wore clean, pressed lab coats and white jumpsuits with beer-proof rubber boots. In every room there were immaculately clean, gigantic, loud pieces of machinery overflowing with puffs of white foam, gurgling like witches’ brew. Rubber hoses poured beer out onto the floor, down into drains in the section of the building where they were cleaning the pipes. The basement room was where the bottles danced around conveyer belts, getting slapped with labels and dropped into neat, pre-printed boxes exactly like the opening scene of Laverne & Shirley, only instead of the comical 70s duo capping the bottle tops, there was a very bored-looking androgynous youngster wearing protective goggles and earplugs.
Once we learned all we could about the process, our chipper tour guide transformed into a generous bartender, serving us a nice glass of each of the various Anchor products: summer ale, bock, porter, lager, barley wine, and holiday ale. Then we got a bonus round of our requested favorite. Joy! Chug! [hiccup] Burp! It was like my birthday! It was like Christmas morn! It was like a perfectly tipsy Monday.
To schedule your own tour, call 415-863-8350 at least 4 weeks in advance.
posted by Freewendy @ 9:29 PM
1 Comments:
At 9:35 AM,
Freewendy said…
Oh yes, indeed. Tasty marketing, too! But i think they meant they don't do traditional marketing in the way of print ads or brochures of that kind of thing. I was already brand loyal before the tour, though. I wonder how many other folks who take the tour are, or if this tour actually does effective marketing.
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