Friday night I had the opportunity to tour the Surly Brewery in Brooklyn Park, this was a pretty unique experience! They don’t do tours all that often and they usually fill up right away but a group that I am had the chance to reserve 20 spots and I jumped on the chance to go to Surly.
Surly started brewing in 2006 and they have expanded very rapidly, they have grown so fast they don’t even sell in liquor stores and are only at select bars and restaurants. How’s that for keeping your product top of mind!
My roommate and I headed to the tour with our canned good donations and found a group and grabbed a beer while we were waiting for the tour to begin. We chatted with the other group members. You received 5 tokens to try the 5 kinds of beer that Surly brews, it worked out well. There was no having to pick and choose what you wanted to taste.
Around 6:15 they let everyone into the brewery and people drank their beers and chatted while waiting for the tour to start. It was a really informal but educational tour, the founder told the whole store of how he got started and some of the difficulties he had experienced. I really appreciate hearing the entrepreneurial stories and just how difficult it can be. While it seems like Surly has been very successful very quickly, they had their fair share of setbacks and frustrations. Going on a tour like this and hearing Omar’s story was really inspirational. It gives me hope that I might figure out my entrepreneurial spirit someday. (I can hope 
).
I tired all 5 beers and rated them in this order from favorite to not so favorite
Furious
Cynic
Bender
Mild
Coffee Bender
Check out the giant wall of beer!
I really appreciate the Surly tries to use quality ingredients and stick to traditional brewing methods and not add fillers or lower quality ingredients to cut down on their production time and costs. Staying true to what you believe in makes for a much more successful business!
If you live in the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area and get a chance to tour Surly, sign up immediately!
{ 2 comments }
i’ve heard that tour is awesome! somebody brought in samples to the store of caramels made with surly furious. sounds weird but I thought they were awesome!
kate´s last [type] ..Cookies and Dip
i’ve heard that tour is awesome! somebody brought in samples to the store of caramels made with surly furious. sounds weird but I thought they were awesome!
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