Tour of Stone Brewery

Well last week I had the unique opportunity to go to Stone Brewery just outside of San Diego, CA. The picture on the left is a view from their garden into the restaurant and bar. Behind the restaurant and bar is the brewery.
I only had Arrogant Bastard a few times (back in Texas), and never dreamed I would be in their brewery. Fortunately my Aunt and Uncle Susan and David live in Ramona, and brought me there to take to tour and have dinner. The picture to the right is my Uncle David and I enjoying a Smoked Porter and Pliney The elder respectively.

This was a fantastic tour of a microbrewery. I was able to sample various Stone beers like Stone Smoked Porter, a Belgian Trippel, Pliney, a Pale Ale, and Double Bastard. All of them were excellent.

The tour started off quite well with a few homebrewers in our group. The tour guide had a glass of their pale ale that he said was for example, but he drank it and then said that we couldn’t drink until the end of the tour. He then said that their brewery upholds their Arrogance (as in Arrogant Bastard Ale), and that was part of it. He walked us through from milling the grain and water purification to fermentation. I found the water purification particularly interesting, since a lot of homebrewers don’t worry too much about this step. He spent a few minutes talking about how the Escondido water is not world known, so they make the water good by using Reverse Osmosis, chlorine removal, and combining the two to get a water that has some minerals, and is very clean. The horizontal tubes are the RO membranes for the system.
They also mentioned that before this high-speed system, they used to do things a lot more manually, like using egg timers on the equipment, and sitting there watching them, so they could react once the timer went off. Now they get a nice alarm from a computer, and the process stops automatically. The egg timer thing is pretty close to homebrewing for sure!
The picture on the right is one my uncle took–his camera was quite a bit better than mine, and he got some really good equipment shots.

Overall the system is pretty well automated, and he said it didn’t come with much of a manual, so as long as nothing breaks or stops working, it is pretty easy to run. They punch in the numbers (grains in pounds, mash temp, etc), and the computer alerts them once each stage is complete. This is their third brewery, which has tripled in size each time they moved. The brewing setup was installed by brewing builders from Germany.

At the end, we sampled a few different Stone beers. They have three different yeast strains–probably a US-05/American Ale 1056 equivalent for most of their beers. They also have a Belgian Trappist strain that they made a great Belgian Trippel with. I was probably most impressed with the Smoked Porter. I think it was the best smoked beer I’ve ever had. They did a great job of balancing it so that the smoke was pleasant, and not overpowering. It was in the aroma as well as the flavor. I also finally got to try the Double Bastard, which I tried to get in Texas, but was never able to do so. Hopefully I will get the chance to have some more of the great Stone beers again in the future!

Filed under: Blogroll, Brewery Adventures