Fordham Brewery
Last Friday Robert & I went down to Fordham Brewing Company in Dover, DE before work to pick up some base grains and a very fair price. We left around 6:30AM so we could stop and get breakfast, get to Fordham, and still make it back to work by 9:00AM.
We already knew where we where going to go for breakfast, Helen’s Famous Sausage House of course! If you have never had a Helen’s sausage sandwich before and you are a breakfast sandwich person, then you are missing out on one of the best breakfast sandwiches ever (heart-attack on a roll). A Helen’s sausage sandwich is two homemade sausage links that are larger than hotdogs deep fried with a fried egg and Cheese-Wiz on a hotdog roll. It is so obnoxious, that I typically take off one of the links and eat it first, then eat the remainder as a sandwich. It is an awfully good treat, but typically my digestive track is correct for the rest of the day.
After Helen’s we continued down to Fordham. We met up with Walter the head brewer there and bullshitted for a little while. We talked about what’s new at Fordham, how things have been in the last year, and when am I going to come down and volunteer again. While we were there (at 8:00 in the morning) Walt offered us some beer samples after a very brief and informal brewery tour. We tried two beers, my favorite their Tavern Ale which is only sold on tap and is a cross between an American and an English Pale Ale and there new summer seasonal which was a Hefeweizen aged on raspberry puree. The summer seasonal was pretty good, definitely something Karen would have liked, but it is unfortunate for them that they missed some sort of labeling approval and could not bottle it this year, so it is only available on draft.
Some of the news I picked up down at Fordham is huge for them. First off they hired two new employees, both brewers, one from Old Dominion in VA and one from the American Brewer’s Guild. Also, Fordham has “bought out” Old Dominion, now owning Old Dominion in VA, Fordham in DE, and all the Ram’s Heads in MD, and reforming under the mother company name of Coastal Brewing Company. On top of that, Anheuser-Busch apparently “bought out” a large chunk (49% I believe) of Coastal Brewing. Supposedly it has to do with a distribution deal, and Fordham and Old Dominion products should soon be available minimally up and down the east coast wherever Anheuser-Busch products are available – which is everywhere. I believe Walt said that Fordham currently produces around 7,500 bbls of beer annual right now and A-B promised them an increase to 250,000 bbls of beer annually in the next five years with the majority of the production coming out of Dover, DE. Take all of this with a grain of salt because it was all spoken about very conversationally and I am only putting down what I think I remember. So enjoy the tasty nuggets!
August 3rd, 2007 at 1:47 pm
If they are expanding to that level ….. maybe a future there for you……….
August 3rd, 2007 at 5:18 pm
Well, maybe. At this point, the only thing that could pay enough at the brewery would be a brewer or management. And in particularly with AB moving in I bet they with have a much higher criteria of who they higher for what. Yes, I may be able to get a job as a keg-cleaner or some other starting postion (which economically would have been possible even like 4 years ago), but I really can’t afford to make that kind of move anymore, well not until you hit the lottery ;-).