June 25th, 2014
25 Jun 2014 · page 382 of 1306
Ever smelt a brewery? It's not nice.
Cast: Benjamin Thackerey, Heinrich Wolfe, Jack O'Malley
Comments (27)
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Ahh, the brewery tour. If you've already developed a taste for alcohol, then it's a fascinating and educational process.
If you're a kid, like I was? And you can smell the place two miles down the road before arriving?
I've never touched a drop of beer in my life.
My dad's a photographer- he had a shoot once that I came along to, a fishing competition on a riverside next to a brewery. If you think breweries smell bad to start with, mix in fish guts and bait. I've never been so close to throwing up just from a smell..
Oooooh yeah, my dad homebrews so I grew up with the smell and I was assisting a photographer one day and we ended up in a brewery. Thankfully you stop noticing it after like 20 minutes but for those first 20 I had to try really hard to not just be constantly making faces!
Geeze, what kind of beer are they making in the breweries you're talking about? Maybe it's a big lager brewery thing, because all of the Northern California small breweries smell wonderful! Toast, cereal and caramelized sugars, Mmmmm!
I can only speak for the Guinness brewery in Dublin (where I used to work a long time ago) but it stank to high heaven of Hops. You can still smell it in the city centre (about 2 miles away from brewery) when the wind is blowing in the right direction. It is a total assualt on the nasal passages, but after a while working there you don't notice it anymore as your nose shuts down in self defense.
Could have been worse--it might have been a rum factory! UGH!
Been round breweries, especially inside it can be pretty intense, but nothing on a cheese factory (I guess sour I worse than bitter to me). Living near chocolate factories and sugar beet plant means I'm used to the idea of things tasting better than the factory smells, but it almost put me off cheese going round he dairy.
That's weird. I toured a cheese factory one, and I don't recall it smelling of very much at all.
There's a brewery round our way. I used to walk to the bus every morning having no idea why everything smelled of ruined porridge. Turns out that's brewery smell. The funny thing is I haven't smelt it for years, so either they've improved how they do things or I've acclimatised. God, you could smell it for miles - and it was one of those smells that's almost quite nice and almost an assault.
I love Mal's ability to induce rage in Ben without even trying
Ah, forgot about the term "Buggerup". I missed it.
I for one love the smell of FRESH yeast, and hate the smell of old spilled beer, so it is at once an amazing and horrifying smell.
My! 'Under new management'! What an innocuous piece of fluff that will have nothing to do with anything!
No one knows where this is going, nope!
Deosil Brewery? I see what you did there.
No, Mal, you didn't "...say nothin'..."
...and you didn't say it very loudly and distinctly.
Ahh, grin and bear it Ben. The snarky drifter did save your life.
Never been in a large scale brewery myself. I imagine it's much worse than a small homebrew shop.
My wife is homebrewer and it smells great even when scaled up.
There used to be a brewery just down the street from where I live. Sometimes when the wind blew from their direction, we'd smell it. Wasn't nice.
It has since been torn down and replaced by a pub, which seems to be quite common with breweries. This has improved the smell some, but now there's a lot of noise, because it`is a very big, fancy and popular establishment. I'm just glad I don't live any closer to it.
Recent studies revealed genetic differences in how people respond to bitterness, such as to the hops in beer. What smells good to one person smells bitter to another. The differences are small but real.
[http://healthland.time.com/...](http://healthland.time.com/2013/08/07/the-beer-smell-gene-and-other-ways-dna-drives-our-senses/ "http://healthland.time.com/2013/08/07/the-beer-smell-gene-and-other-ways-dna-drives-our-senses/")
[http://www.latimes.com/scie...](http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-sense-of-smell-20130801-story.html "http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-sense-of-smell-20130801-story.html")
Similarly, cilantro (Mexican parsley) tastes good to some people and like soap to others.
It's called coriander in civilised languages such as English and Dutch :-P. Also, some of us think it tastes good and a bit like soap. Apparently that's not allowed; the coriander-haters insist that you must, by bleedin' law, either love it like an idiot or hate it forever and forever, but I assure you I really do like it in moderate doses and think it tastes unpleasantly soapy if, and only if, it's over-used. (And no, I don't mean "over-used" to mean "any use at all", picky-tongue.)
I know I'm a late arrival, but Americans reserve the term "coriander" for the seeds of the same plant. Since they taste rather different but can appear in similar contexts, it saves our easily-addled heads from confusion and needing to use an extra word on the page ("coriander seeds" or "coriander leaves").
I too fall into the "soapy in a good way" category.
Spanish isn't a civilized language?
I think we just met our first authentic Yorkshireman...
Mal's expression in the last panel and his general snarkiness . . . I think I'm in love with him . . .
As a hophead myself, I find most of the smells from a brewery to be wonderful. However, I will agree that the dregs of used barley and hops will start fermenting immediately. If not stored properly, that will create uh, interesting? smells.