I had some time to kill in Milwaukee before my flight home. What to do what to do...
Miller Brewery Tour!
I wore my Michelob Ultra jacket to see if I could bait someone into beating me up. That didn't happen but I did get some good comments. The guy taking tickets at the tour was like "you got the wrong jacket on buddy". I'm not your buddy, pal.
I couldn't help but compare this to the Anheuser-Busch tour. I've been on that one numerous times so I'm sort of a scholar on the topic. First point for AB was that the Miller tour wasn't free. $10!? The hell is that about?
The "photo they try to make you buy at the end of the tour" point goes to Miller. They had fun photobooth-style props for you to play with in your pics. My favorites were the cheese head hat and the empty beer keg.
Miller had a similar story to AB's in the case of making all kinds of weird stuff to try to survive Prohibition. Miller was founded in 1855... yadda yadda... I think their oldest existing brand might be Miller High Life from 1903.
The beginning of the Miller tour I think takes the win because they passed us out our first free beer then had a really cool video in a little theater. AB doesn't have a video component at all which I think is kind of odd considering how much marketing material they could squeeze into it.
Much of the video was narrated by the girl in the moon from the High Life logo.
Miller also seems to have a Christmas light thing. Copycats!
It was funny sometimes I felt like I was in an alternate universe. One of Milwaukee's nicknames is "Cream City" due to the color of the nearby clay deposits which produce this light yellowish colored brick. I say parallel universe because AB is also brick land but it's all a deep red.
They do have a stable but there are no horses. Sad! Everybody knows you need horses to make beer.
This wooden man is showing how they would pack the caves with ice blocks to get things even colder.
Despite its lack of horses Miller does win a point for allowing visitors to check out some of their underground cave cellar system. My understanding is that St. Louis is a beer town partly because it has an extensive system of caves of its own. Ours seems to all be sealed up though, which is real lame.
They often quip during the A-B tour that Miller is made from all the A-B beer that falls on the floor, so I was surprised to see they were doing some brewing on site.
At the end of the tour they hand you a wooden nickel which you can redeem for a beer at a local bar or restaurant that's on the official list. I thought that was a really nice way to encourage tourists to visit a local place and spend some more money in the neighborhood.
I spent my wooden nickel at Saz's State House Restaurant.
I picked up some Milwaukee-made fancy cheeses at the Clock Shadow Creamery to take home with me.
Then hit the airport.
The little zone right after security where you are trying to put your shoes, belt, jacket, and backpack back on is known as the Recombobulation Area in the Milwaukee airport. Real fun.
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