Review: Frederick Ahoy! - Steve Segletes (July 1998)

The weather started out just fine as Tony Vacek, Steve Wall, and I departed from DuClaw's, our predesignated departure site, in my gray '84 battleship made by Oldsmobile. Talk of hops was in the air as we rolled along I-70, hurtling headlong towards Frederick, the site of the club's latest designated venture site. I wheeled the helm to starboard at Mt. Airy as we sought out the Mt. Airy Brewing Co., located at the Firehouse Pub & Grill. The quaint facility was quickly located but alas, the owner was unprepared to accommodate a tour as he and staff were busy preparing for the day's opening at noon. I did, however, note the wide selection of ales chalked in on their board, including a Bitter, Amber, Nut Brown, Porter, Pale, Canadian Export, and even a Peaches 'n Cream, whatever that is. Oh well, with some disappointment, we departed uncertain as to whether we would return later in the day.

We proceeded at full speed into Frederick, shooting up Market Street in search of Brewer's Alley, Frederick's first brewpub, located on an historic Frederick site that has served in many capacities over the centuries: as a brewery, a town hall & market, opera house, city offices, and once again a brewery. The head brewer was not in that day, but that manager was helpful in answering many of our questions. I seem to recall that they brew about 6 times a month. Their setup was viewable from the pub area through big plate glass windows, and appeared to be about the capacity of the Sisson's Brewpub rig. Their beers, which are also available at the minor league Key Stadium, included a Kolsch, Hefeweizen, Dunkelweizen, Nut Brown, Oatmeal Stout, IPA, and a special Cask-Conditioned IPA.

The Kolsch is their best seller, though we universally found several of their other products to be far more to our liking. In particular, both the Hefeweizen and the Cask-Conditioned IPA received rave reviews. The IPA was very hoppy (perhaps dry-hopped with Cascade), perfect at room temperature, noted Tony. The first words out of Steve's mouth were "Oh yeah, I like that," which summed up the general mood of our group. The Hefeweizen was dubbed "totally Bavarian and delicious" in my notes. With tip, prices approached $3 per standard sized mug. We ate lunch at a quaint nearby restaurant, Donelly's Saloon and Fishery, located within walking distance (though we chose nonetheless to drive there just to keep the battleship's boilers stoked).

A little stretched to make the 1:30 brew tour at the newly located Frederick Brewing Company (makers of fine Blue Ridge, Wild Goose, and Brimstone products), we departed Donelly's at flank speed. We would have made it too, had our navigation charts been more detailed. As it was, we arrived at the distinctively facaded facility a few minutes late, though fortunately, the CEO was still plying other tourgoers with the requisite pre-tour samples. (The structure looked like a 3-D rendition of a Blue Ridge label: yellow and angular.)

There were no less than (and perhaps more than) 12 tapped products from the three Frederick product lines. It was difficult to know where to start... and even harder to know where to end. The beers were all fresh, clean, and tasty. At their current 40 to 45 thousand barrels per year, they are the largest regional brewer by quite a bit. Nonetheless, they are operating at about half their present capacity, with room to further expand the facility by about a factor of two. Even with their 20 years of debt, they seem poised to take on the regional beer market. On hospitality alone, they could surely make it. I apologize to him and the club for not knowing his name, but our tourgiver (company CEO and co-founder) was as nice, generous and polite as they come. He regaled us with some brewing history, explaining how the U.S. had several thousands of breweries in the late 1800's, the golden age of American brewing (Idaho Territory had more than 30 breweries, but not enough people to be a state). Prohibition wiped out all but 800 of them by 1950. By the 1970's, we were down to 42 breweries.

The one saving grace of Prohibition, he pointed out, was that it also wiped clean the slate of American brewing tradition, so that as a nation we were no longer constrained to brew a certain way, or with certain ingredients, or to a certain style. As such, the American brewing renaissance allowed us to brew any damned way we pleased. The 1400 breweries in America today offer a wider selection than is found in any other country in the world. God Bless America.

The brewing rig had all the standard tuns, though with nearly total automation. Only hop-flower addition was, it seemed, still a labor intensive process. During the tour, we learned how Brimstone's Big Strong Ale ferments without external cooling, so that the yeast essentially works until it dies of heat exhaustion, with the wort topping out at 100 degrees by the end of fermentation. For some or most of the Wild Goose brews, they use a Hop Infusion Vessel, which essentially is an oversized coffee percolator for making Hop Tea prior to being added to the boiling wort. In this way, the actual hop acid extraction occurs in water, not wort.

The brewery uses a total of three yeast strains -- an ale yeast, a lager yeast, and Ringwood ale yeast for the Wild Goose line. These are stored and kept active in sealed vessels in a room just off their Fermentation Hall. The so-called Fermentation Hall contains 16 fermenting vessels (with room for growth), each of 100 or 200 bbl. capacity. Interestingly, each stage of the beer-making process occurs in a completely separate and isolated room so that, should any stray infection occur in the product, the room can be sealed and sterilized without affecting the adjacent stages of fermentation. Correspondingly, these rooms are connected by an inordinate amount of stainless tubing, 1.75 miles in total, to carry around product from station to station.

After fermentation, they use a centrifugal yeast separator that allows them to essentially "dial in" how much sediment they want removed from the product. Every ounce of beer the brewery produces goes through this single device. None to my surprise, we were told how Sierra Nevada first employed this technique, though there are only about 5 or 6 of these devices in use in North American breweries. From here, the beer is filtered and then bottled.

The bottling line handles 250 bottles per minute (a vast improvement over their older facility, I assure you). The neat thing about it is that if a bottle breaks on the filling line (sometimes happens during the air evacuation process), the bottler automatically detects this and discards all the filled bottles that were not capped at the moment of accident (sending them off a different conveyor). It then goes into self cleaning mode to get all the glass particles and sticky beer off of itself. When done, it resumes bottling. Stylish!

I asked our host why Blue Ridge products have the letters BMNT prominently displayed on the label. He sheepishly answered that it was a secret, but told me off-line that it used to say BEER, but that the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco & Firearms told them that they couldn't have the word BEER on the same label as, for example, PORTER, because it would be confusing to the consumer. Rather than completely redesigning the labels, they just changed the letters to BMNT. He wouldn't say what it stood for, but I can only presume it is something less than flattering about the BATF. The answer to that question could go down in history alongside of the "33" on Rolling Rock bottles, I think.

The brewery employs about 45 people in total. And though there is much cross-training at the facility (that includes the several brewers across the three product lines), every keg of Frederick beer is kegged by one employee named Wayne (he likes working by himself). As we concluded our tour, our host remained gracious to the last, allowing stragglers like ourselves to pummel him with questions while, at the same time, drinking his beers freely. Truly a gentleman and a scholar.

By this point, the skys had opened up in truly biblical proportions, and I wasn't too sure that the Olds battleship was as seaworthy as Noah's Ark. A number of motorists were capsized on the shoulder of I-70, but we managed to hold a steady course east. One last port of call, The Red Brick Station in White Marsh, provided harbor from the storm on the journey home. Tony, of course, had written a wonderful review of this fine facility in last month's newsletter, so I won't dwell on things other than to say that we all enjoyed their truly roasty Stout (how do they make it so roasty?) and found their Cask-Conditioned Red Ale to be replete with fruity esters.

I docked back in Bel Air long enough to expel the boys down the gangplank to DuClaws, and navigated the remaining few miles back home to rejoin the real world and regale my wife with wonderful memories of our Frederick cruise.