Inside Bube’s Brewery
When we drove to Mount Joy, Pennsylvania in search of Bube’s Brewery (see my previous post: “Introducing Bube’s Brewery“) we didn’t know what to expect since I hadn’t done any prior research other than grabbing the street address from BeerMapping.com. The only glitch was the street address. Mount Joy has two roads named North Market. One of them, the first one we found was called North Market Avenue. Bube’s Brewery is on North Market Street—a very important distinction if you want to find the brewery.
From the street, Bube’s Brewery doesn’t look like much. In fact, my wife and I thought it was closed, but years of beer travel has taught me that appearances are often deceiving. The best thing to do when looking for a brewpub or brewery is to pound on a few doors or just walk in the first unlocked door you can find. That’s what we did. We opened up the yellow painted door under the Bube’s sign and found ourselves in dark seemingly endless system of stairs, tunnels, cavernous rooms, and passageways.
We ate in the taproom/tavern, called the Bottling Works. This crypt-like space is dark, dusty, and cozy. It was the part of the original Brewery where the beer was bottled. Seating is available in a front dining area, at the bar, or in the back room where there’s a stage for live musical performance. For an appetizer we had pretzels dipped in Boursin cheese. This is a simple signature dish at Bube’s and is served complimentary before dinner in the Catacombs.
Of course, I ordered the beer sampler. It consisted of the four regular house beers and a Belgian trippel. The trippel was excellent and I had to order another ten ounce goblet of that. The whole time I was scribbling in my notebook and snapping photos, so the waitress asked me if I was “a beer critic.” I explained that beer and brewpub evaluation were indeed my avocation. She told me that if I wanted to wander around the place and see some of the other parts of the Brewery, I could. She went off to get some keys. At that moment I had no idea about the extent of the Bube’s complex.
My first tour of Bube’s Brewery was self-guided and with a Belgian trippel in hand. We first wandered past a large pit with a pulley system suspended over it, down some rock-hewn steps into a room with five enormous wooden barrels. It was then that I started to piece together the facts. Bube’s Brewery was a real, historic brewery, not just a brewpub/microbrewery and here were the 19th century fermentation vessels to prove it.
The next room we entered was the art gallery. From the art gallery were steps leading up to the Alois restaurant and then a cave-like area that I learned later were steps down to the Catacombs. We wander back past the wooden barrels and up another flight of stairs into a loft space called the Cooper Shed, located over the entryway and microbrewery. The Cooper Shed is the part of the original Brewery where the keg barrels where manufactured, and now it’s part homebrew shop, gift shop, and brewery museum. The Cooper Shed contained one gem of a resource that would help to inform our Pennsylvania brewpub tour in a major way: a book by Lew Bryson called Pennsylvania Breweries.
Your visit brings back fond memories. Friends of ours own a bed-and-breakfast in the area and made us reservations at Bube’s when we visited — a cool place to dine in. Loved it!