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The Rocket, a friend and owner of Raleigh’s The Borough, has been readying me for a Monday afternoon kidnapping for quite some time now. Threats and the Rocket’s general demeanor convinced me to clear my calendar for the afternoon of Monday, April 14th. Forgive me gods of productivity… I had no choice… their was to be beer involved. In fact that was the only thing that i knew going into the afternoon’s activities. The Rocket showed up at my office at the stroke of 3. She had already kidnapped Bart and stolen a car for the “ride”. Where are we going I ask, not expecting an answer. With a glare she deny’s revealing any information about our destinations.

About an hour later we arrive at a small warehouse in the city limits of Farmville, NC. An unassuming white building trimmed in moss and rust we barged into the only door we could find. Paul the owner and brewmaster of Duck Rabbit Brewery greeted us. Explaining that he and the one other person that works at DR had just finished a brew and he was ready to dedicate the rest of the day to our little “tour”.

Elated to be surrounded by giant shinny fermenters, huge brew kettles and the aroma of sparged barley… I was grinning ear to ear. When asked whether we would like the “geeky version” or the “regular version” of the tour i begged for the geeky version. What followed was about two hours of wall to wall questions… “what does this do”, “how long does that take”, “where do you get your malted barley from”, “what percentage of the beer would you say you drink?” All kinds of questions, and Paul had answers for all of them. We finished off with a short tasting of the DR’s 3 standards, The Amber, The Brown, and of course the milk stout. In addition he shared the seasonal with us… the Barleywine. One of my favorite products of Duck Rabbit, I’ve noted the attributes of the Barleywine in a previous post.

If you are curious, this isn’t really special treatment. Nearly all the microbreweries in NC do regular or scheduled free tours. Frankly I’ve been surprised by the amount of hospitality, if not outright eagerness local breweries display to share their trade with the brew faithful. Go ahead, give your local brewery a call and find out when you can check out their digs, further, nearly all tours end with a free tasting… and as you know, the only thing that’s better than beer is free beer!

Thanks Rocket!!!

This entry was posted on Monday, April 21st, 2008 at 2:09 am and is filed under Beer Fun, Beer History. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.