Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
manufacture you've just witnessed—but fortunately, this is the only store in which
you'll also find “Belly Flops,” which are misshapen beans that didn't make the com-
mercial cut, for $8 per 2-pound bag. The free tour should be ample for most peo-
ple, but the company does sell expensive ($45 adults, $30 kids) tours of the actual
factory floor on a walk-in basis Monday through Friday, which it calls “Jelly Belly
University”; you won't learn too much more than you'd learn on the free version,
but you'll get a T-shirt. The factory is located in Fairfield, just a very short zip off
the I-80 freeway (you won't get lost), about an hour north of San Francisco, far
enough for a sugar crash to become a problem. If you'll be spending any time in
Wine Country, it's about 30 minutes from Napa or Sonoma towns.
When you walk into the ginormous factory at
Anheuser-Busch Brewery Tours
(3101 Busch Dr.;
%
707/429-7595; www.budweisertours.com; June-Aug Mon-Sat
10am-4pm, Sept-May Tues-Sat 10am-4pm),
you'd be excused for thinking that
they're manufacturing passenger planes here and not 12-ounce bottles of beer. It's
simply gargantuan. Although it seems, at first, as if a visitor might be disturbing
the workflow at this industrial complex, the staff is, in fact, welcoming to the few
visitors it receives (just 50,000 a year) relative to the bustling Jelly Belly factory
across the street. (You should definitely combine them on a trip.) Here, you can
just walk in anytime, and you'll be escorted above the factory floor to a gift
shop-cum-tasting room, where you'll watch an overproduced video that cheer-
leads the Anheuser-Busch brands such as Budweiser and Michelob. Once the bald
marketing bit is out of the way, though, you'll be taken on a walk-through of the
mighty facility, from the deafening clatter of the machine that bottles 1,800 beers
a minute (each bottle ends up spending 2
1
⁄
2
hours on this daunting line) to the
“cold room”—really more like a cold hangar—where 120 12-ft.-diameter, 72-ft.-
long tanks are stacked up three stories high; they're filled with enough aging beer,
21 days at a time, to fill 60 million bottles. You wouldn't want to be under these
full tanks in an earthquake. Impressively, this facility has gotten its waste down so
low that only 0.9% of its refuse ends up in landfills—everything else is recycled
or reused. Despite the truly staggering size of the facility, it's the second-smallest
one in the Anheuser-Busch empire. All this effort to make such a disappointing
beer! Kids under 21 are allowed, but, of course, they won't be permitted to
indulge in the tasting.
HOW LOCALS LEARN
Here's a Left Coast idea: a
Craft Gym
(1452 Bush St., at Van Ness;
%
415/
441-6223; www.craftgym.com).
It's set up a lot like a gym where a person might
work out, except everything is geared toward making crafts. The tools, reference
materials, workspaces—all are waiting for anyone who wants to give their creativ-
ity a workout. Day passes cost $18, but the best way to go is probably to partici-
pate in one of its many workshops, which take 3 hours and happen during the
day on Saturdays or during the evening on weekdays. They're led by local artists
who work daily in that medium and usually cost about $65 including a $15 mate-
rials fee. Topics are nothing if not rangy—pewter casting, flip-book making,
photo-frame-pendant making—and there's usually something planned every day
except Wednesday. Some people use the Craft Gym as their own ateliers, so if
you're crafty, you'll find it an interesting place to meet locals with like interests.
