Athens isn’t the only Georgia college town that is also home to a brewery. Earlier this month, I went to The Burnt Hickory Brewery in Kennesaw to celebrate my brother Joey’s birthday. I had heard of it before, but even though I lived in Kennesaw for years, I still hadn’t ventured enough for a visit. Joey is a brewery fanatic, and he really wanted to check some cool ones out before he and his wife Kristen went back to California. So, he decided Burnt Hickory was calling our names and planned to have a little family outing to top off our holiday visit. My parents were excited to come too; my mom has been a fan of one of their IPAs called Cannon Dragger. My sister Amanda and her fiancé Chad were able to join us too, and I was so happy we could all go out and celebrate together. It’s harder every year to get everyone’s busy schedules in synch, so it makes the times we can all be together even more special.
When I pulled up to the brewery, I was surprised at how tucked away it was. The more I thought about it, though, the more fitting it was for the whole atmosphere. And, I really liked the old truck parked out in front. It had “Free your mind and your glass will follow” painted on the side, which is the perfect mindset to have before visiting this place. Burnt Hickory is a small brewery, and it's only been open for about four years. But the charm, clever names and tasty variety of home-brew style beers place them in the top tier of Georgia breweries. My brother even said it was his new favorite brewery in Georgia, which is saying a lot coming from a Terrapin-territory alumnus.
Once we got inside, we figured out how they do things. It’s not the same as every other brewery I’ve gone to where you get a pint glass and tickets. Instead, you get a plastic cup and tickets for six beers while you’re there, but you can also cash those in for bombers or six packs to take home with you. Since I never use all the drink tickets at breweries anyway, and I have enough pint glasses to stock a Taco Mac, I thought this was brilliant. You really get more for your money, and my brother was extra excited that he could take his beer souvenirs (souvenbeers?) home to San Diego. Which might be the furthest one of these beers has ever travelled, since they don’t distribute to many places outside of Kennesaw.
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I loved checking out all the cool things on the walls. There was such a good mix of old posters, music and civil war themed artwork, and plenty of other retro/wilderness type things. Eclectic is a good way to describe the decor, and the beer as a matter of fact. I wasn’t sure which style I wanted to try first. As I read the different taps, I decided I’d go with the one that had the best name for the occasion, General Joe’s Quickstep Joe. It was a sour style Weisse that reminded me of the Psycho Kinesis I had at the Thirsty Monk in Asheville. My dad and brother went for Ezekiel’s Wheel, nicknamed "The Zeke,” which we learned was one of the original homebrew recipes the owner invented before founding the brewery.
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We sipped our beers and chatted with some friendly people, and overheard that there was a tour starting soon so we eagerly jumped at the opportunity. I’ve been on a handful of brewery tours, but this one was unlike any other. It started off with a single barstool sitting in the middle of the warehouse floor. A man I saw my brother talking to earlier propped himself on it and, without waiting for the group of gathered people to quiet down, began to introduce himself as Scott, the founder of Burnt Hickory and the most characteristic tour guide I’ve ever seen. He began by explaining the process of how beer is made, but he was able to take highly scientific and specific processes and simplify them in a way that made it easy to understand, and also very entertaining.
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What I thought was interesting was how Scott was able to take a home brew recipe and replicate it on a large scale. One of the things I learned about the process is that a beer’s flavor is dependent on the way each of the ingredients behave under specific conditions. Smaller breweries don’t fine-tune their processes the way corporate breweries do, so there is some natural variation between batches. A Bud Light tastes the same no matter where you get it from, but a Cannon Dragger might be different depending on the slight changes in temperature or timing during the brewing process. Those anomalies definitely add to the layers of character you’ll find at Burnt Hickory.
During our tour, we were given a special tasting of two batches that had been ‘cold-crashed’ (beer vocab for cold-filtered) for fourteen days, the last step before carbonating and bottling. A guy poured us a pitcher of Big Shanty straight out of the big metal vat, which seemed to make the crowd excited because this variety was a rarity. Beer tastes pretty weird before it’s been finished, and I wasn’t a big fan of it. But Joey, Chad and my dad seemed to think it was awesome. We also tried their Fighting Bishop, a Belgian triple style.
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After our thorough and exciting beer lesson, we hung out and chatted with a few more people before leaving with no less than a huge box full of beer. No exaggeration. After some much needed pasta from Twisted Kitchen, we headed home. I’m so glad I finally checked this place out, and I’ll definitely be coming back for their anniversary party in April which sounds like an absolute blast. They’ll be serving 60 different kinds of beer, and there will be live music and food trucks all day. I can’t wait for it to be warm out again! If you have any ideas for which brewery I should check out next, leave me a comment below. And be sure to go say hey to Scott at Burnt Hickory, he’d be glad to give you a beer and a laugh anytime.