Beer Travel: Visiting Ommegang Brewery

After attending a wedding, F and I drove from the Finger Lakes area to Cooperstown in New  York State. After a morning where we visited the Baseball Hall of Fame, we drove to the other big attraction (well, to us… and it was the one I was certainly more interested in) of Cooperstown, the Ommegang Brewery. The time of year we were visiting Ommegang Brewery was in September, so the foliage was gorgeous on the short 6 mile drive south from Cooperstown.

To park, yes you get to drive through that arch to get to the parking lot.

The entrance to the tasting room/restaurant, as well as the shop and where you can sign up for a tasting, a tour, or both (like we did – both are offered every 30 minutes), is also back there. You can make reservations for Cafe Ommegang for dinner, but it’s first come first serve to get your name on the list for tours and lunch. You must be at least 5 years old to take the tour and 21 years old to participate in a tasting.

There were nice details of their iconic lion logo as part of the landscaping, and the doors promoted their enthusiasm for their product proclaiming

“You cannot be a real country unles you have Beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer” – Frank Zappa.

Another door offered more quotes-

• “The problem with the world is that everyone is always a few drinks behind” – Humphrey Bogart
• “When a glass sits on a table here, people don’t wonder if it’s half filled or half empty. They just hope it’s good beer.” – Sherman Alexie
• “I would rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy” – Tom Waits
• “What contemptible scoundrel has stolen the cork to my lunch?” – W.C. Fields
• “He was a wise man who invented beer.” Plato

You may be wondering what a famous brewery like this is doing out in this village of around 2000 people and area of 1.5 square miles, Cooperstown. Well, it turns out that in the 19th century, Cooperstown was the center of the legendary upstate New York hops industry. Almost every farm in the county Cooperstown is located, Otsego County, grew some hops, and the Otsego County hops were considered the best in the America.

Then, early in the 20th century a series of blights – mold, aphids, Prohibition, caused the fall of the region’s hops industry. When Ommegang Brewery built its location in 1997, it did so on what used to be a hop farm, and with a goal of cooperation between farmers and brewers as the area tries to re-explore a revival of the hops industry. On the land of Ommegang Brewery, we were able to even tour some new strains of hops that are being grown here in order to experiment working with Cornell University.

As part of our tour, we also saw beermaking in the works as liquid drained to the floor while steam made it seem magical, and we watched the bottling line – I’ve seen the machines off but never working before this brewery tour.

Of course the best thing is the tasting portion!

For a $5 fee per person, we tasted 6 beers, and we each got to keep the tasting glass so it’s so well worth it.

The tasting was very educational in that they are prepared to also help you smell individual ingredients to help you learn to appreciate the various kinds of special ingredients they use in the brewing process in creating their beers.

Ommegang beer tasting for us included

• Witte Wheat Ale brewed with Sweet Orange Peel and Coriander
  
• Scythe and Sickle, a Bière de Garde style beer that was a Harvest Ale brewed with barley, wheat, oats and rye as a nod to the harvest of upstate New  York grains.
  
• Rare Vos Belgian Amber Ale brewed with Sweet Orange Peel, Grains of Paradise, Coriander
  
• Hennepin Farmhouse Saison brewed with Grains of Paradise, Coriander, Ginger, and Sweet Orange Peel. I found it refreshing and bubbly like a sparkling wine!
  
• Abbey Ale  Dubbel Ale brewed with Licorice Root, Star Anise, Sweet Orange Peel, Coriander and Cumin
• Three Philosophers Quadruple Ale with Cherries via blend of Ommegang Quadruple Ale and Liefmans Kriek
  

They offered us a couple little snacks as we were tasting including their own Abbey Ale and Rare VO5 beer cheeses, their horseradish mustard, and some Saratoga Garlic wasabi and horseradish aioli with pretzels, among several jars of stuff to share amont the group. The beer cheese is the bomb.

We finished up by having our late lunch at their cafe, if by lunch you mean frites and a flight of Duvel Belgian beers and their Wild At Heart brewed with wild Brett. They change the food and beer menu seasonally, and they are well known for promoting beer and food pairings, even offering beer food recipes on their website.

You can pick up shirts, bottles, and the beer cheese at the store on the way out.

I’ll be off to Sante Fe next week, which naturally will incorporate more beer travel as we visit some Sante Fe breweries, so you’ll see some more beercation Travel Tuesday posts in a bit. I also have on my queue posts from Denver while I was at the Great American Beer Festival!

Have you had Ommegang beer before? Which of the beers in the tasting sounds most delicious to you?

Have you been to Sante Fe and have any recommendations of sights, eats, or drinks?