keninabu!

Saint Arnold Brewery

Yesterday I went for lunch with A., and after lunch we visited the Saint Arnold brewery here in Houston.

The brewery is really just a small sized warehouse, filled with a number of tanks and fermentation vats, and is located in the industrial warehouse district of north Houston, around Katy. When we arrived, there were tons of people: there must have been at least a 100 people lining up to enter the brewery. Outside there was a homebrewing picnic or something, with a lot of people lounging around with kegs of mash (mashed malted barley mixed with hot water) and homebrewed beer.

We walked into the brewery, and received a glass and four wooden nickels. We then kind of lounged around until the chief brewer and owner of Saint Arnold, Brock Wagner, climbed onto a pretty high platform to heckle, yell and educate us on the fineties of beer making.

Of interest was what he said about hops: if you add the hops early on in the beer making process, when you are boiling the mash, you get a bitterness that balances out the sweetness of the malt. If you add the hops later on in the beer making process, you get more of the fragrant characteristics of the hops, depending on what type of hops are used.

After talking, he opened up the beer area, where the beer was served, and it was a HUGE line. The area is kind of like an indoor biergarten, which was very conducive for meeting people and just chatting. A lot of people were there with their families, and they wisely brought their own picnics with them, and ate while pairing their food with their beer: A. and I kind of kicked ourselves for not thinking about that earlier!

We later got four small beers, after waiting in line forever: I got their Texas Wheat, Summer Pils, Amber ale and their Brown ale. It's the first time I was having their Brown ale, and it is GOOD: chocolatey, brown, hoppy but balanced, it is awesome stuff. I also loved their Amber ale, which is by far one of the best beers I've had to date, for certain. It's very hoppy, but balanced such that the finish is crisp.

We ended up befriending these guys who were father and son, the dad was an environmental consultant, and we had a great time chatting about all kinds of stuff, like Colbert ripping into President Bush at the Whitehouse Correspondent's Association Dinner, or about environmental policy (or lack thereof) in the USA, and other things un-beer related like that.

Good times. Nothing like making friends when slightly tipsy, and drinking really fine beer while doing that!

posted by keninabu @ 5:30 PM