During the Great American Beer Festival a group of us visited the Denver area. We went to only one session of the GABF, though we were there four days. We visited many breweries, bars, and stores during the trip. One of our activities was touring the New Belgium brewery, best know for their consumer driven flagship beer, Fat Tire.

I have tasted Fat Tire before and though I appreciate that it is a gateway beer that introduces mainstream beer drinkers to better craft offerings, it is not a beer that would ever get a regular spot in my fridge at home. I am a big fan of their 1154 offering and their sour, La Folie.

The tour was registered for long in advance from the brewery website which was unusual. Most of the other arrangements I made for our GABF were based on emails back and forth. The tour was also disclosed as a 90 minute event, much longer then any other tour of any other brewery I arranged.

The first thing I noticed was approaching the New Belgium brewery was the sheer size. It was much larger then any other craft brewery we visited. The campus was on 55 acres.

We parked a distance away and walked up. The first thing you notice at the entrance of the brewery was the big bike rack in front and the sheer volume of  bikes in front of the building. I glanced through the bikes and most of them had New Belgium logos on them but were of varying styles. To a Floridian like me this was a highly unusual sight.

We checked in with a New Belgium employee in front of the building and headed in to wait for our tour to start. They were fairly crowded. We asked if this was due to GABF being in town but the New Belgium employee told us that this was the normal crowd for the time we were visiting.

The was a lot of New Belgium decorations and products  for sale all around the welcome area. I didn’t buy anything but there were some unique gifts that fit in with the New Belgium culture such as bicycle racing gear.

We were struck by how young the crowd was here. We visited many breweries while we were in Colorado but the crowd at New Belgium was the youngest by far. There were many attentive employees in the bar area serving samples of all the New Belgium offerings. You could also buy packs, cases, and growlers to go.

We were given one token to sample a beer while we were waiting for the tour to start. Apparently, there are only free samples of the draft poured here and no tips are accepted by the servers.

Our tour started on time and our group of about 30 were greeted in the brewing area by our New Belgium tour guide, Kaitlyn. She said she had been there only about three months but she proved to be very knowledgeable.

I was curious as to why our brewery tour would last 90 minutes which is longer then most brewery tours. We quickly learned that they felt they had a unique story to tell us and they went into detail about the history and the mission of the company.

The brewery is pristine and laid out well. They were well prepared for the tour and  had nice sized samples for us set up for us at different stations throughout the brewery.

The first beer we sample was their abbey ale which I enjoyed. The second was Mothership Wit, an organic offering. Not my favorite style, but again I felt it was a solid offering.

I’m not going to go into the whole story of the history of the brewery but I will say it was compelling and made you feel a personal connection to the brewery and the beers.

We were taken into the brew kettle room. There were four brew kettles here. All had unique tile art work around them depicting different scenes for the New Belgium employees. This was an impressive site.

We were told about some benefits of being a New Belgium employee. At the one year anniversary they are given a custom New Belgium bike and part ownership in the company (New Belgium is a completely employee owned company). At the five year mark employees receive a week long paid vacation to Belgium. At the ten year mark employees receive a month long sabbatical to do whatever they want with. Few companies probably offer these sort of incentives these days.

The company has a Director of Fun that has been there since the beginning basically. He make sure the employees are happy and engaged. Some evidence we saw of this was a volleyball game that seemingly all employees we came in contact with were going to that night. There was a ping pong table in the bottling area. Also in the bottling area, an employee held up an unidentifiable origami animal of some sort up in front of our window and paraded it back and forth. To top it off there was a circular slide that employees and guests could go down that my kids would have been jealous of. The employees we encountered were clearly engaged and enjoyed their jobs.

There was also a garden outside that employees were allowed to plant fruit in. I tasted a plum from here that I must say was one of the tastiest plums I have ever had.

Most people are aware that many breweries are very responsible when it comes to their impact on the environment and that New Belgium is one of the leaders in this areas. We learned that most employees bike to work. If you do chose to drive your vehicle to work to work where you park is based on how how fuel efficient your vehicle is. Bicycles park the closest, followed by motorcycles, then the most fuel efficient vehicles. The biggest gas guzzlers park the furthest away from the brewery. I thought this was awesome.

We tasted Fat Tire that was just hours old; the freshest Fat Tire we would ever taste. Still didn’t like it.

We were taken into the barrel room which was very impressive. There were several massive barrels aging sour beers. Here we sample La Folie. This was a delicious sour brown beer that I would buy regularly if it was available to me.

Distribution came up next as it was asked would New Belgium come to X state, including Florida. The answer we were given was eventually they hoped to be in all states but they were going to grow at a controlled base that allowed them to maintain their culture. So South Florida the best I can tell you is cross your fingers for 2011 or 2012.

At this point we were offered a chance to go down the slide. We needed to leave to move on to the next part of our tour. We skipped out at this point. Our understanding is that we would have had the understanding that we would have been able to go to the bar shortly there after and do some more sampling.

My summary would be that this was a very a very enjoyable, informative tour with the opportunity to sample some enjoyable. I really enjoyed the picture that was painted of the employee culture. I left with the feeling that I can’t wait for New Belgium to make it to South Florida. If for no other reason then I can stop answering the questions about Fat Tire.