PHOTOS
Lisa Sokolowski
My brother is going to grad school at SUNY Binghamton and has lived the last year in a house with three of his friends. I hadn't seen his place (maybe I'm a bad sister?), so I drove up there this past weekend.
I bought him a two-liter of Mountain Dew (his favorite) and a bag of peanuts in Mets packaging (his favorite team), and that was going to be my housewarming gift.
Thank goodness The Lion Brewery helped me look like a much better sister.
The Brewery recently came out with its new summer beer - Midsummer White (a Belgian-style wheat ale) - and gifted me with a case of it after I took a tour through the bottle shop.
A case of beer in one hand and a bag with soda and peanuts in the other all of a sudden made me the best sister ever.
But let's talk about the Brewery first. The tour I took was incredible. I felt like I was in Hershey Park, but instead of learning how to make chocolate, I learned about beer.
To enter, you need a hard hat and glasses - glasses that fog up upon entry. Greeting you inside is the area where the beer is pasteurized and poured into bottles. The empties are stacked on pallets with 177 cases' worth. That's 4,050 bottles - so, if one of those bottles should happen to fall ... yeah, it would happen here.
From there, the beer goes to the labeler. There are four at the Lion Brewery, three plastic and one paper. Then the bottles are packaged - which was my favorite part of the tour.
You start with flat boxes. A machine puffs them up, adds glue, and sticks the bottom together.
OK, that doesn't sound nearly as fun as it actually is to watch.
Then, a machine puts the six-pack packaging into the case boxes, another machine drops in 24 bottles, an expiration date is added, and the boxes are sealed, shrink-wrapped, and shipped out to warehouses.
The Lion Brewery makes 18,000 to 20,000 cases per line per day and usually has two lines daily. From start to finish, it takes about 1 minute, 15 seconds for a bottle, said bottle shop supervisor Jerry Hawkins.
Kind of makes you feel guilty for pounding them, now does it?
My brother is past the age of fake IDs, so chugging the sweet orange peel/coriander brew wasn't happening. Instead, the guys sipped it - and his housemate J.J. even decided to gargle it, his version of swirl, sniff, and spit, perhaps. He said the gargling really brought out the faint orange taste.
My brother Joe suggested adding a slice of orange to the light beer if you want to kill the head or the carbonation.
As they were discussing the beer with Marty (who thought it was "smooth" and "sweet"), J.J. decided it would be the perfect summer barbeque beer. And we found the perfect BBQ game - deciphering the word games on the bottle caps.
While my brother and I were staring at E + penny (e-one? e-coin? e-money? ain't was the closest Joe came up with), J.J. quickly figured out it meant isn't (e-cent, oooh!).
Soon after J.J. proved to be the word puzzle master, Drew, the final housemate, came home from a long day at work, opened the fridge to grab a bottle, and joined the Midsummer White party.
Not a bad way to end the day.