BEST TOUR EVER

On Tuesday, March 5, during our spring break in Key West, my roommate Josh and his girlfriend Kat and I decided to stop by the Key West Brewery.  We had tried some Key West Lager during dinner at Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville restaurant a couple nights before, and Josh, being the huge homebrew enthusiast that he is, wanted to stop by the brewery and see if we could take a tour.  So we did, and it was the best tour ever.  We expected a formal tour, but when we showed up, we found a few people lounging around in front of the factory, drinking beer.  They were really friendly and told us to come in and have as much beer as we wanted.  Josh brought some of his homebrew (we brought a lot down to cut down on our drinkin' budget) and everyone liked it.  I brought my camera along and took some pictures for some extra credit in my Operations Management class.  Here they are:

Here's Josh and Kat with Dan Aviles, the head of brewing operations (center) and Dave, who does contract work for the brewery.

Here I am taking one of what was to be many samples of their fine product.

Dan showed us around the factory, talking mostly to Josh about the technical stuff.  Here I am on the platform on top of the mash tun, lauter tun, and wort boiler, pretending to know what I'm doing.  Hell, Josh just told me what the shiny things are called 5 minutes ago.

It was a pretty big warehouse.  Here's a row of fermenters.  Those are often filled with beer.  How cool is that?

One still was filled with their Sunset Ale, which was finished, but not pasteurized yet.  Talk about a giant keg, eh?

As the evening wore on and we got drunker, my photos steadily became more random and crappy.

Before we left, they gave us 2 CASES of bottles of their beer that didn't pass inspection because they were slightly underfilled, and 6 TAP HEADS, all for FREE!  Needless to say, we had a great time.