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Saturday, October 3, 2015: We signed up for a Columbus Brew Tour from AAA. We were picked up shortly before 9:00 AM from Home Depot on the east side of Indianapolis. | |
Shortly after 10:00 AM, we had a shopping/rest room break at Meijer in Richmond, so we picked up some snacks and a brand new car seat so we could pick up our granddaughter on the way home later on. Here's the storage under the bus with a bunch of coolers for beer and our car seat box in the back. | |
We arrived in Columbus around 11:45, ... | |
... and headed to German Village, just south of downtown Columbus. | |
Our destination was at the end of this street, ... | |
... Schmidt's Sausage Haus und Restaurant. | |
We were escorted upstairs where a buffet was being set up, ... | |
... and seated in a private room adjacent to it. Some members of our party took advantage of the bar to get started on their beer experience, but we chose to pace ourselves. | |
We had some lovely reading material while we waited for our table to be sent to the buffet. | |
Lunch consisted of salad, rolls, applesauce, fried chicken, sauerkraut, potato salad, and two types of wurst. The red sausage is a Bahama Mama, a specialty of the house (or should we say "haus"?), and the other one is a traditional German knockwurst. | |
After lunch, we had time to stroll around the neighborhood, so we did some browsing at Schmidt's Fudge Haus ... | |
... before busting out our wallet for a beautiful glass chain pull and a pair of men's Solmate socks at this little boutique. | |
Our next stop was Wolf's Ridge Brewing. | |
It was 1:30 by now and we were ready to finally sample some beers. | |
Our group spread out over several tables, so we joined a group at the table in the lower right of this photo. We chose well, because our new drinking buddies turned out to be very fun. | |
There was a pretty great selection of beers on tap at the bar. | |
Check out this huge display on the wall. Wolf's Ridge has a line of beers named Dire Wolf featuring this artwork. | |
The entrance to the brewery was right around the corner from our table. | |
Half of our group toured the brewery at a time. | |
One of the brewery's owners was our tour guide. He told us all about how beer is made and about what they were currently brewing. | |
In a corner of the brewery was this little display of sample bottles with that cool Dire Wolf artwork. | |
Back at our table, we finished off our beer samples and ordered one or two more, including a coconut porter that tasted like a regular porter. | |
By 2:45, we were leaving Wolf's Ridge and heading to ... | |
... North High Brewing Co. One of the owners, Gavin, told us all about their history and beers. | |
We sampled several beers, ... | |
... including a delicious jalalima brew that Tom particularly liked. | |
We had a few minutes to look around. Here's a gigantic stencil of the company's logo. | |
Tom got a closeup of some of the empty cans waiting to be filled. These cans are Hefeweizen, ... | |
... and these are Milk Stout. | |
We made an unscheduled stop at the brewery's bar a short distance away where we waited forever to purchase Jalalima in a growler. | |
We pulled into our final stop, Barley's Smokehouse & Brewpub, around 4:30. | |
We were deep into Ohio State territory, obviously. | |
An owner or brewmaster or server or somebody (we had been drinking for a while by now so we weren't paying really close attention) came out to tell us about the samples we'd be receiving. | |
Again, we split into two groups to tour the tiny brewery. | |
We heard our third explanation of the day about how beer is made. | |
We looked at some big shiny tanks, ... | |
... and some not-so-shiny Woodford Reserve bourbon barrels, ... | |
... and some medium-shiny kegs. | |
We toasted with our temporary drinking buddies before getting back on the bus at 6:00 PM for the long drive back to Indy.
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Copyright © Deborah Schilling/Thomas Bundy