Columbus, Ohio 2015


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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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