Sam Adams to sell beer at Boston Brewery

[MikeyC]

Came across this article in the Boston Globe a couple of days ago. Personally I think this is very cool news! The tour is a GREAT time if you've never been and now afterward you can pick up some limited edition beer!

Here's a link to the article and the text as well:

http://www.boston.com/business/artic...l_brews_at_hq/

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Limited-edition libation
Boston Beer gets OK to sell special Samuel Adams in brewery gift shop
By Dave Copeland
Globe Correspondent / October 24, 2009
The company doesn’t keep records of how many people tour the brewery, but it estimates that the number has increased by about 50 percent in the past five years. Michelle Sullivan, a spokeswoman for Boston Beer, said it’s not uncommon for 1,000 people to visit on a Saturday or Sunday.

Until now they could not buy beer there, even though about half the visitors wanted to, Sullivan said. Instead, they were given a card with walking directions to nearby liquor stores.

That will change next week, when Boston Beer begins selling limited- edition Samuel Adams brews in its gift shop. The company received a license from the state in August, but it delayed the start of sales to coincide with the release of its new Barrel-Aged Collection.

“Our goal is to sell beers that are harder to find - the limited-edition beers and the beers we’re experimenting with - at the brewery,’’ Sullivan said. “We’re not going to be selling Octoberfest at the brewery.’’

The three beers that make up the Barrel-Aged Collection - New World Tripel, American Kriek, and Stony Brook Red - are certainly going to qualify as hard to find. Boston Beer will only distribute them in 750-milliliter bottles, the size of a wine bottle, in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, and Denver, where Koch first won the Great American Beer Festival in 1985. The bottles, priced at $9.95, won’t be sold in six-packs.

Unlike the traditional brewing process, which involves metal tanks, barrel-aging includes an additional fermenting period in wooden barrels that each hold about 4,000 gallons. The barrel-aged beers are then blended with other beers. The company hopes the resulting hybrid brews will help it win over drinkers of wine and hard liquor.

Koch said he began experimenting with barrel-aged beers 15 years ago. Samuel Adams Triple Bock was released in 1995 - “way ahead of its time,’’ he said - but the new offerings, aged for 12 months, will be more accessible. They are scheduled to be formally unveiled Wednesday at a media reception and on Thursday during an open house at the brewery.

“These are very different beers,’’ said Bert Boyce, a brewer who joined Boston Beer two years ago and has been working on barrel-aged beers since. “Anything goes - these are our kitchen sink beers,’’ Boyce said. “There are no rules and we can do whatever we want with them.’’

To obtain a farmer-brewers license to sell beer at the brewery, Boston Beer had to demonstrate that it was “contributing to the economic development of agriculture’’ in Massachusetts, Sullivan said. That means that in addition to growing hops and malt on the premises, spent grain is sent to a dairy farm in Foxborough where it is used as cattle feed. The brewery also had to make some minor changes in the way its gift shop was laid out, Koch said.

“Frankly, we just had a lot of other things we wanted to do,’’ Koch said when asked why he waited 21 years after he started offering tours to apply for a license to sell beer. “There are a few steps you have to go through to get the license, and it never seemed like a priority until the past few years when we started getting more and more visitors.’’