Exciting tasting room & visitor center updates from Weyerbacher:
Have you ever been to Weyerbacher’s Visitors Center? It’s a really cool way to peek behind the curtain and see what makes one of your favorite breweries tick. At the Visitors Center, we presently offer:
- FREE ~2 oz. samples of any of the available styles of beer
- FREE in-depth tours of our entire facility from brewing to fermentation to packaging
- Branded merchandise sales such as glassware, shirts and hats
- Carry-out beer sales in any quantity you desire from a single bottle or growler to a truckload of kegs
Sounds pretty awesome, right? It is awesome! But then come the hours of operation: Many folks have told me how hard it is to actually visit Weyerbacher because we’re only open for a grand total of 6 hours a week—Friday, 4:30pm to 7:00pm and Saturday, 12:00 to 3:30pm. Combine this narrow window of availability with the average person’s litany of social or business obligations and I can see how visiting us can become pretty tough for some.
Weyerbacher’s tiny Visitors Center can also be a challenge to find. We’re located in an industrial property behind several other businesses. The door into the Visitors Center isn’t terribly obvious at first. The parking lot can even be difficult to locate, thanks to the sad looking sign by the road which has met the bumpers of many a delivery vehicle. Once inside, it’s pretty close quarters; The tasting bar, merchandise & beer sales registers are all located in a relatively poorly-lit corner of our brewery warehouse.
Despite all the negatives I’ve just tried to illustrate, we still have several hundred visitors tour the brewery and sample our beers each week! Maybe it is a pseudo-speakeasy vibe? We’re quite thankful for the ever growing number of visitors who’ve made the trek over the last twelve years!
Here’s where the aforementioned exciting changes come into play:
By about the end of September 2013, the Visitors Center hours of operation will expand to 12:00pm to 7:00pm Monday through Saturday!
With this huge change in accessibility comes some pretty serious hardware and facility upgrades, too! We’ve relocated the existing tasting bar in order to make room for a brand new bar which will feature 24 taps and nearly double the amount of bar length! This new bar will allow us to more easily engage with our visitors and allow for a bunch more breathing room during our very busy times. Samples will still be FREE! Also underway: new commercial-grade glass entry doors, fully-renovated bathrooms with baby changing stations as well!
Over the next few months we’ll begin to add new exterior signage, new interior decor including much nicer lighting and new merchandise displays. We’ll be displaying framed original oil-on-canvas label artwork and eventually we’ll have a museum-like trophy case(s) to show you lots of our retired beers—still in full, capped bottles—as well as some of our old labels, packaging and pub artifacts from all the way back to 1995! If I may quote Jerry, “What a long, strange trip it’s been!”
As if all that wasn’t enough, we’re finally expanding our lineup of Weyerbacher branded gear! More on that in a future article.
Our hours presently remain unchanged (Fri evenings and Saturday afternoons only) until further notice so please stay tuned for news of a date when we’ll go to the expanded hours. Meanwhile, take a look at the photos of the project as it stands today!
New Poured Concrete Bar
Poured Concrete Bar Surface
New, Inviting Entrance
Mixed Textures
One of Two Banks of Taps
New Bath Fixtures
Family Friendly!
Space for Framed Label Art
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