The other big event of my summer vacation was visiting Brewery Ommegang near Cooperstown, New York.  We’re both big fans of their beers, so we thought it would be great to go see where they’re made, and hopefully get to taste any special brews they had on tap at the cafe.

Alas, the cafe was closed due to unspecified “plumbing problems”.  So we knew as soon as we arrived that we weren’t going to stay for lunch, and there probably wouldn’t be anything special to sample.  So we took the standard tour which ends with a tasting of their standard beers (Witte, BPA, Hennepin, Rare Vos and Three Philosophers).  The tour was reasonably well done — walking around the outside of the brewery, getting a decent look at the goings-on inside (even if it’s mostly just big tanks), with a good overview of the brewing process and a constant focus on how Belgian-style brewing differs from the regular American brewing.  I’ve taken a few brewery tours and brewed a few batches myself, and I still learned a couple things (like they store their spent grains in a giant cow-patterned silo because they sell them for cow feed, and their kegs aren’t bottle-conditioned so they’re really quite different from the bottled beer).

The tour suffers from Ommegang being an uncomfortably middle-sized brewery.  I’ve taken the tour at a giant brewery like Guinness, and they’ve got a giant, slick production with museum-quality exhibits, movies about barrel making, and a gift shop that wouldn’t be out of place at Disneyland.  And I’ve toured a few tiny breweries, where you can wander freely around the brewery floor, and the tour guide is taking time off from brewing to show you around, and the older guy in the tasting room turns out to be the master brewer.  But Ommegang is a little larger, and obviously growing quickly.  They’re too big to let you wander around while they’re busily cranking out product, but they’re not big enough to have given up letting you watch them actually brew beer.

The tasting at the end of the tour was well done — out on the patio on a nice summer day, with a very good description of each beer, what they’d pair well with, etc.  The gift shop was crowded, but did have great prices for the standard Ommegang beers and nice glasses.  We headed into Cooperstown for lunch, and found a nice pizza place on Urban Spoon.

In all, I’d say it’s well worth the trip, but frustratingly fell short of the awesome experience I was hoping for.