Searching for the line between "hobby" and "obsession"

Stevens Point Brewery

On the way to play a festival show with my band near Green Bay, Wisconsin last weekend, the drummer and I made a stop at Stevens Point Brewery in – where else – Stevens Point, Wisconsin, to check this brewery off my tour list. Honestly, I was a little disappointed in the tour. It was led by some cute college chick who was just rattling off a script as fast as she could. Some might find my complaint odd, but do you really want to learn about the nitty gritty inner-workings of a brewery from anyone but one of the brewers? Granted, if I wanted to be on a brewer-led tour I probably shouldn’t have shown up on a Saturday afternoon near the end of summer (this is me giving them the benefit of the doubt). She had her script down fine enough, but I held back all my beer geeky questions so as not to piss her off.

Also, note to the world: please don’t bring your screaming kids on a brewery tour. This is adult time. Thank you.

Stuff I was able to glean:
Point brews twice daily Monday-Friday and has capacity to output 600 bbls. per day, over 100,000 bbls. per year. By comparison, you may recall from my visit to Flat Earth Brewery in St. Paul, MN, I learned they output only around 1,000 bbls. per year. Point Brewing is much larger than I’d perceived. And it’s not just Point beer that they brew. This place has become known for assisting start-up brewers by devoting capacity to contract brewing. Roughly 30% of their yearly capacity, in fact. This is where Minneapolis’s own, Fulton has been brewing some of their beers for the last few years as they work to get their downtown brewery up and running (here’s the latest update on their blog from 8/22/11). Point recently purchased and has begun to produce James Page Brewing, a Minneapolis-based brand that went under a few years back.

Excluding the contract brews, 75% of Point beers are bottled with the remaining output ending up in cans or kegs. Our young tour guide was very proud to tout that all Point’s bottled and canned beer is pasteurized… This sort of seems at odds with the whole micro-brew movement that often touts a fresh, raw, unique product in comparison to the big guys. But I guess if you consider how long Point has been around (since 1857, a year longer than the town itself), their history is in trying to be one of the nations big brewers. That didn’t exactly work out and they were putting out a crap product for a very long time until they were bought by their current owners who’ve attempted to bring the brewery into the modern “craft” era. On the whole, they’re doing a really good job at this and have been winning awards for the better part of the last decade. I just wouldn’t tout the whole pasteurization thing, as it’s kind of synonymous with “bland” even though I’ll admit that’s sort of a misconception. Sort of…

The tasting:
Though we were allowed to sample any of the 11 beers they had on tap, the tasting portion of the tour felt quite rushed. We were in there for 15 minutes tops before it was “time to go.” I got three samples down the hatch – their Oktoberfest, Raspberry Saison (of the “Whole Hog” limited edition series), and their Belgian White which was actually my favorite of the three.

Overall, I’m glad we made this pit stop. Not anywhere near the best brewery tour I’ve been on (which is still Lakefront in Milwaukee, by the way), but a bad brewery tour is still better than no tour at all. Here are some more pics:

Love seeing them using the same malted barley I can buy at the brew shop.

Two-story mash kettle

Separate lauter tun

Lots of fermentation capacity!

a WHOLE lot

industrial wort chiller

It used to take seven guys to run the kegging line doing just pony kegs. Now they do standard kegs and it only takes one guy to run the machine. So... six guys lost their jobs? 😉 Something to consider tweaking in the tour script.

Nice cans...

Other brands they contract-brew:

Bottling line!

Still good, right? It's been pasteurized, after all...

The tasting room tap lines pictured here. Interesting that their 2012 "black" ale is a mild. "2012" seems to have big, evil, apocalyptic connotations unbefitting a mild ale...

Gettin' Surly on stage at the outdoor festival show later that night.

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