Everytime I wander around the Prescott Courthouse Square and visit Prescott Brewing I always have the same thought, I need to visit more often. A few weekends ago was one of those occasions when our local homebrew club visited the brewery for tour, tasting, and a lunch. We were not disappointed.

As we arrived we were escorted through the beer coaster laden walls to the back of the brewpub where the brewroom and Jan the headbrewer waited for us. You can see the brewroom from the bar with the glass door and windows allowing full access to see the brewers work down below. This first thing that strikes you is how compact their brewing operation is with the mash tun, brew kettle, and fermenter tanks in a space not much larger than some living rooms. To enter the brewroom we took the spiral staircase down to the brew room, again a space saving device.

One advantage of taking a tour of with a bunch of homebrewers is you can immediately jump into the detail aireas and skip over the brewing basics. Jan was great about answering our many and detailed questions. Being homebrewers we had no shortage of questions and nearly ran late because of it.

The cooler room was filled with a number of Grundy tanks and a few larger serving tanks. The beers only need to travel about 65 feet from tank to tap, talk about fresh beer.

The tasting was perhaps the best part of the experience so we could listen to what Jan intended as we tasted their beers. Prescott typically has 6 Flagship beers but with typically 7-11 beers on tap at any given time. Generally the beers revolve around tree based names. The Lodgepole Light is a cream ale that had light straw color and good head retention. It had a light sweet malt flavor with a slightly fruit aroma. Then we had the Liquid Amber, their best selling, which had a coppery color light malt character with light carmel notes. After that we had the Bumbleberry ale which was an interesting fruit beer. It had a ruby red color that feature a tartness with a sweet finish. It reminded me of a flavor fruit spakling water drink. Not something I would typical drink but on a hot Summer day it could be very refreshing. Next was the Prescott Pale ale, the first beer we could really detect a hop presence in the beer. It was a clear yellowside of orange with a hint of Cascade hops and very good balance. The Ponderosa IPA was a GABF award winning and it was interesting comparison to the uberhoppy beers of the Western US. Not to say it was subdued, but rather there was a very balanced hop profile to the malt which made for a very drinkable beer, so much so it was one of the pitchers we ordered later. The Dubbel-A-Thon Ale was probably my favorite beer of the day. A true Beligian Dubbel it had nice sweetness with banana estery quality with deep carmel color. While it's only the second time they have brewed it will eventually be an award winning beer I'll tell you now. The FunkenDunkel was an interesting animal, good carbonation with sweet malt character and a dark muddled brown color almost like a Spring riverbed. I prefer the clove and banana esters in my wheats, which this didn't have so it wasn't my style of beer but it was a different interpretation of what a wheat beer could be. Last was the Petrified Porter which had a roasted character to it but it was hard to say much more as by this point we had tasted many beers.

We finished the tasting with lunch I had a simple burger, but they grind the meat in house and what a difference it makes, probably the best burger I have had in years. People next to me had the pot roast and they said it was equally good in fact of the 12 of us everyone enjoyed their meal with no complaints except perhaps we couldn't get pitchers of the Dubbel.

It's been a month since the tour and all I can say is I need to get down there more often.

Pictures of the tour

The Arizona Republic has a book review on The Essential Reference of Domestic Brewers and Their Bottled Brands, 2nd Edition it sounds pretty interesting. I think it might be worth the price for the beer geek crowd, myself included because of the live updates on the website which means the material won't get dated. I think it might be a little more worth the money with beer descriptions, but then beer blogging could always filling the blanks. I checked out the online sample it was very through for the material covered, unfortunately no one has reviewed it on Amazon as of yet.

Computer issues have held off some brewery reviews, but I should have them online soon.

Great article about beer and college. (via Good Beer Blog) Especially for those freshman here in Flagstaff at NAU.

I had to stop by the book store and pickup my broken computer, still broke need to replace, but it was interesting to see what students were doing 11 years after I left, same and different, same and yet very different.