Adam Mathews and Jon Denman aren’t giving up their day jobs just yet. They’re not interested in high-pressure sales tactics, they say, or making fortunes. They just want to share their passion: making beer.
A new beer maker has surged ahead to become the largest in America — and it probably isn’t the one you think.
Samuel Adams is giving its social network a say in the brewing process by crowd-sourcing a beer.
The Central Hotel bar is decorated like a fin de siecle Parisian brothel, with dark wallpaper, low lights, a ceiling painted green and portraits of scantily clad ladies in various poses gracing the walls. Great atmosphere. Perfect for a murder.
My wife and I were making a weekend of it at Bube’s Brewery in tiny Mount Joy, Pa., between Harrisburg and Lancaster. This lovely area of rolling farmland has long been dominated by residents of German descent; back in 1876, Bube, an immigrant from Bavaria, opened a brewery in a two-story stone structure on North Market Street to serve them his popular lager. As his fortunes rose, he outgrew the old brewery and added a bottling works next door. In 1879, he built the three-story, Victorian-style Central Hotel, notable for its intricate brickwork. It backed onto the other side of the original brewery building, completing the block-long row that still stands today. Bube’s empire lasted until 1920, the year Prohibition was introduced, and the brewery closed for good.
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Which is better, bottling or kegging? It’s one of the great homebrew debates, right up there with extract vs. all-grain and batch sparging vs. fly sparging. Both bottling and kegging have their advantages and disadvantages, and both can be onerous at times. Peeling labels off of used bottles is one of the worst tasks in homebrewing. But in the frustration department, finding a CO2 leak in your system when the beer is already in the keg is right up there.
