Photo by Paul Christiansen
Louisiana is famous for its food and its cocktails, for its coffees and spices. But where do all these products begin? We (writer-photographer duo Kristy and Paul Christiansen) are on a mission to discover the origins of some of our most famous and unique locally made products through the bi-monthly Country Roads series, “Made in Louisiana.”
Our latest “Made in Louisiana” tour brought us to the quaint Northshore town of Abita Springs. Famous for its natural spring water, the town is also home to Abita Brewing Company—Louisiana’s first and largest craft brewery.
Abita brewed its first beers in 1986 at its original location at the Abita Brew Pub, which still operates as a restaurant on Holly Street in Abita Springs. In 1994, they expanded, moving a mile and a half outside of town and opening the Abita Brewery Visitor Center and Tap Room. “We started to get big in the late eighties and early nineties,” explained Tap Room Manager David Hensley. “Golden was Abita’s first beer, but Amber put them on the map. At the time, no one was making amber beer, and it set us apart. Before, Americans only had lagers, and now they discovered they could have something different.”
Today, Abita produces fourteen varieties of beer year-round, plus several seasonal and limited-edition versions. The Tap Room carries them all, including the most popular, Purple Haze, and the newest packaged combo still waiting to hit the shelves—the Hoppy Pack. Another advantage of visiting the Tap Room is access to the brewery tours.
Ari Pomerleau, our afternoon tour guide, ushered our group of beer enthusiasts beyond the gift shop through the double doors and up the stairs. We emerged in a large room containing several silver silos. Pomerleau gestured to the viewing window in the top of one, and as I gazed into the depths of the tank, I realized we were only seeing the tip of the silo inside this room. Each one extended far below us down to the first floor. She explained that during the work week, the containers are filled to capacity, busy prepping and transforming raw ingredients into the first stages of Abita’s beer.
[While in Abita Springs, use this getaway guide to make the most of the charming village.]
“Does anyone know what four ingredients are in beer?” Pomerleau queried the group. Most shook their head no, so she continued, “Water is the most important ingredient. It makes up ninety-four percent of beer, and Abita uses the Southern Hills Aquifer, an underground river, that supplies all of our water. The other three ingredients are barley, hops, and yeast.”
Abita is truly fortunate in its access to Abita Springs’ water, known for its purity and long rumored to contain healing qualities. Unlike other beers, Abita’s water needs no chemical treatments and is free of man-made pollutants. It’s simply perfect, straight from the well.
Barley, featured prominently on Abita’s logo, is a fiber-filled grain that’s first malted, or processed, before being transformed into beer. Abita buys its barley already malted from the locations in the U.S. and Canada. Pomerleau pulled several jars off the shelf and invited us to smell the difference between the light malts, the caramel ones used in Abita Amber, and the chocolate malts used in dark beer.
Next, she passed around a jar filled with pelletized hops, explaining how Abita’s brewmaster travels to dry areas of the country to hand-select the hops they will use. The hops, which are actually flowers from the hop plant, are then picked, pelletized, and delivered to the brewery. The varying hop flavors determine their use in the brewing process, with bitter hops added to offset the sweetness of the malted barley and flavorful hops used for their taste and aroma.
“And yeast? It creates the CO2 and ethanol, so bubbles and alcohol,” she explained.
[Read this: "Made in Louisiana: Konriko Rice"]
The ingredients are added in a methodical process, and the enormous stainless-steel vessels are an integral part of the method. Start with the mash tun, where malted barley is milled and turned into grist. This is then mixed with warm water to convert the starches into sugar and produce an oatmeal-like mash. From here, the mash moves to the lauter tun, similar to a giant coffee press that smashes the grains to release the water. The extracted liquid, called the wort, is then transferred to the brew kettle for boiling. It’s here where the hops are added in at three different stages before the entire mix moves to the whirlpool to separate out the solid hops from the wort. From mash tun to whirlpool, the entire process takes about five hours.
After the wort cools, it’s showtime for the yeast. For the next four to fourteen days, depending on the type of beer being made, the brew ferments. Abita has fifty-eight fermentation tanks, twelve of which are 800-barrel tanks—the equivalent of 42,000 six packs.
Our tour continued into an enormous room containing the first of the fermentation tanks. As we kept walking, the tanks became smaller, downsizing from 400-barrel tanks to 300-barrel ones.
“Golden was Abita’s first beer, but Amber put them on the map. At the time, no one was making amber beer, and it set us apart. Before, Americans only had lagers, and now they discovered they could have something different.”
In a corner of the room stood miniature replicas of the mash tun, lauter tun, brew kettle, and whirlpool. Pomerleau explained that this is where the specialty beers are made. Not bottled or distributed, these beers are produced in smaller batches and are only available in the Tap Room.
At the time of our visit, the Tap Room was featuring three different German specialty beers.
The final leg of our tour showed us where the brew is then aged for a minimum of fourteen days. Here, the yeast settles and separates and is drained from the tank and set aside until it’s reawakened to be used for the next batch. The beer is then filtered and ready for packaging. This last step in the process is off-limits to the public, but we were given an overview of the state-of-the-art bottling service, which sanitizes, dates, fills, packages, and labels 24,000 bottles of beer an hour. The finished product is then delivered to forty-two states and twelve countries, including every Shake Shack in the world—and the New Orleans Superdome. “We recently became the official craft beer of the New Orleans Saints,” said Hensley. “It’s the biggest thing we’ve done in the history of this company.”
The tour exits into the Tap Room, where we each received a pint of our choice to personally taste “Louisiana Culture on Tap.”
