Last weekend the wife and I were able to escape Iowa and we headed to the Twin Cities for some much needed R&R. This trip started out as as a very generous birthday present from my parents. My dad knew that I have been wanting to add a new wort chiller to my brewing arsenal. So he said hey I will get you the chiller but why don't you just go up to the cities and  pick it up at Midwest Supply? What a great reason to go visit my to favorite shops in person!! My wife made it even better by getting on line and getting us tours of both Summit brewing and Surly brewing!!  I cannot believe she got us into both as these tours fill up weeks in advance! I want to thank my parents and my wife for what turned out to be one Awesome trip!!

Standing in Summits beautiful tasting room!
We started off Friday with a stop at Ikea this was the only request my wife had for the weekend. Although the store was being remodeled and the shopping selection was less than stellar we still were able to get everything we were looking for.( including 6 new beer mugs for 1.99 a piece let me tell you at that price you cant go wrong) I now have 6 new mugs but I should of bought 12! That night I made a stop at the 4 Firkins beer store where I stocked up on some stuff you just cant get here in Iowa. I now have a fridge full of Surly and also got some beers from Stone,Brooklyn brewing and Descuhtes.  The next stop was at a small new upstart brewery Steel Toe Brewing. http://www.steeltoebrewing.com/ This happen to coincide with a special event there. It was the release of there new double IPA dubbed size 11! This huge beer specs out at 11% ABV and a whooping 111 IBUs dont worry it tastes fantastic! So I scored 2 bottles of this and a growler of there red Rain Maker.

In the very back of Steel Toes brew house are some Templeton Rye barrles!! Word is there full of a special barley wine they will be releasing soon!

The 3 fermentor set up at Steel Toe brewing

Saturday we had two tours on the books an afternoon tour at Summit brewing and an evening tour at Surly brewing. Summit  is an 800,000 barrel brewery so it is a great deal larger than Steel toe and there 3 fermentation tank setup. The tour of summit was great and to see the size and scale of there mid sized operation was impressive. From the huge sunlit tasting room with a beautiful wooden bar,the large copper boil kettles imported from Germany , the cavernous fermentation room and bottling line that can bottle 1200 bottles and hour.  Summit has built them selves a very nice clean facility to produce some good craft brew!! The best part of a tour is of course the free beer afterwords. Our knowledgeable and funny tour guides made this the highlight of the tour.  It was great to get to have a few samples of there Miabock and relax!!

The fermentation room smelled amazing! There are 24 tanks holding somewhere  close to 880 kegs of beer and each tank was close to 3 stories tall! The equipment in the center is there filtration device it was very impressive. On Monday Summit annouced a 6 million dollar expansion it will include an addition to this room and 2 more beers to there line up one a being a year round IPA and an Kolsch  for the summer.

Summit has four beautiful copper kettles imported from Germany

This is the cold storage warehouse at Summit. The tour guide called it his zombie apocalypse hide out and with this much tasty suds in one place I can see why. This was just a week and a half supply for summit in this room. Disclaimer this picture shows maybe 1/4  of the beer in this room and this photo does not do this room justice !!! On the right you see pallets of kegs stacked five high and that stack is at least 30 ft deep!!

The last Brewery we visited on Saturday Was Surly which I feel deserves its own blog because what there doing there is that great until then CHEERS!!!