Free As In Beer

Bored with ourselves a couple of weeks ago, and looking for something to do for a Sunday afternoon that was cheap (and by “cheap” I mean “FREE”), we (and by “we” I mean “my wife”) came up with the idea of going to the Budweiser brewing plant tour in nearby Merrimack, NH.

I know what you’re thinking — how more PERFECT can you get for entertaining a bored 7-year-old by taking her to a brewery?!?! It’s family entertainment GOLD!! I KNOW!!

Look, it’s like this: we have memberships to all the obvious places in Boston like the Museum of Science and the MFA and such and have been to them all a brazillion times. We’ve also plumbed the not-so-obvious things like the Harvard Museum of Natural History, the Mapparium, and my friend Donna’s historical tours of Cambridge. Plus, it’s been a long, cold, snowy winter. In short, we are scraping the bottom of the barrel. But the brewery tour is one of those things that have been a long-standing minor attraction in New England that somehow neither Bridget nor I ever did as kids, Merrimack is barely a half an hour from our door, and…IT’S COMPLETELY FREE. As a bonus, they even give you free beer.

So, after lunch at our favorite Vietnamese place (best pho I have ever had), we drove over to check it out. The day was a little bit warmer than recent weather, which obviously put the wanderlust in the souls of some other people, since we were not the only ones in the waiting room. By the time for the tour came, I’d guess there were 12-16 people, including one other family with three little girls in Charlotte’s age bracket. Clearly there are times when they get a big crowd, since the waiting area and the bar area at the end of the tour had tables and seating to accommodate much bigger groups. There are some company-related artifacts and a timeline of the Anheuser-Busch company to look at while you’re waiting. Staring at empty 50-year-old beer cans and reprints of what passed for “hot girls in skimpy outfits drinking beer” in ads of the 1890s is just enough distraction to keep you at bay until the tour leader arrives.

Sunday is not the busiest day at the brewery, so there wasn’t a lot of activity to see, but I got the impression from the content of the tour guide’s spiel that even if we had been there on a Wednesday it would not have been much different. The tour takes you through the brewing process step by step from mixing through bottling. We got to see scrupulously clean stainless steel mixing tanks first, along with a peek inside a large picture window into the nuclear-plant-like control room full of computer monitors, complete with a Homer Simpson-type worker manning the consoles. As we moved into the fermenting room, we were hit with the unmistakable smell of fresh beer, but it was the only part of the tour that gave the slightest hint that we were in an actual brewery.

In the aging room, the guide explained just what the hell “beechwood aging” means. They talk about “beechwood aging” in the commercials like the beer sits around in big old beechwood barrels like Kentucky whiskey, picking up all sorts of goodness from the wood, but all it means is that the aging tanks have a layer of boiled beechwood shards in the bottom that provide more surface area for the fermenting yeast to consume the sugar. In fact, the wood is boiled to death just so it *won’t* add flavor to the beer. Charlotte and the other kids were allowed to take a shard of beechwood with them as a unique thrill. What was more impressive than the beechwood, though, were the massive storage tanks where the beer ages until it is ready to be packaged. It reminded me of the view of the rows upon rows of matter-antimatter tubes in the Engine Room of the original Starship Enterprise.

The only real bummer was that the bottling line was not running. They clean the bottling room on Sundays, so they shut down the line. From the way the tour guide talked, and from the prominence of the bottling room in the tour (next to last), it’s clear that watching the thousands of beer bottles rolling around on the line is the highlight of the entire tour. If you are old enough to remember the opening credits of “Laverne and Shirley”, you’ll have a vague idea of what we would have seen if we’d been there on, say, a Tuesday. Instead, we saw some very clean, but completely unmoving conveyor belts and nothing else. The tour then ends with a short video about Budweiser and a quick rundown of the various beers produced at that particular plant.

From there, we were led into the bar. All the adults are allowed two 12-ounce glasses of beer from any of the varieties they make there. Some are on tap and some are in bottles. Anheuser-Busch does make a few beers that are in the more popular “craft beer” style, plus they have old-fashioned stand-bys like Michelob, but Budweiser and Bud Light pay the bills. Bridget, who is even less of a beer drinker than I am only took one glass of a beer called “Shocktop”, which apparently is supposed to be marketed at the young, hip crowd who like beers with lots of unusual flavors. The tour guide said it had citrus flavors and a note of coriander. I got a glass of that, too, and also asked for a glass of “American Ale”, their Sam Adams-wannabe product. I liked the American Ale quite a bit. I don’t drink beer for the most part, but when I do I prefer the amber-colored medium beers that have a pronounced hops flavor, and this beer was one of those. I’d definitely order one in a restaurnt or bar if I was looking for a beer. The Shocktop, on the other hand, was horrible. Watery and flavorless in a way that would make regular Budweiser look like a fine hand-crafted brew. I’d rather drink crab juice than Shocktop. Mmmm…crab juice… Neither of us drank even half of that. For the kids, there was a soda fountain, and Charlotte was thoroughly entertained by refilling her 8-ounce Dixie cup over and over with the different flavors of soda.

We finished off our visit by walking over to the horse barns to see the Clydesdales. They always have a few in the stables, even if the majority of them are away at an event somewhere. The horse team at Merrimack covers the entire East Coast and parts of the near Midwest, so they are in very high demand. There were five or six horses in the stable that afternoon. Having seen some Belgian draft horses in person, I was prepared for the enormous size of the animals, but even still…DANG! Them are some big hosses! A couple of them were simply massive, and little old me probably didn’t even come up to their knees. As with the brewery, the stables are immaculate and the horses are clearly pampered. It was very much like the stables at the Royal Mews next to Buckingham Palace in terms of the sense of luxury involved in the horses’ care. The employee charged with greeting guests wasn’t terribly knowledgeable or informative compared to the brewery tour guide, but she was pleasant enough. At one point, as we stood next to one horse’s stall and chatted with her about cats (!), the horse came over looking for a little attention from us. He (all the team horses are male) also chose that moment to whip out his enormous penis for us all to gawk at. The expression “hung like a horse” will always have a far more real meaning to me after that moment. Charlotte wasn’t quite tall enough to see over the stall door, so luckily no one had to explain horse anatomy to her. Whew!

To our surprise, the whole experience did pretty much eat up an entire Sunday afternoon, and other than the cost of lunch and a $10 plush toy Clydesdale at the gift shop, we couldn’t fault the freeness of it all. And I even got one good glass of beer. So I’d call it a success. Unlike some of our more typical weekend adventures, it’s hard to imagine going back and doing it again anytime soon, but it was definitely one to add to the Life List.