Photo via New Glarus Brewing Co. - newglarusbrewing.com
New Glarus Brewing Co. Brewery
Aerial view of New Glarus Brewing Company brewery
Summer in Green County, Wisconsin, is met with warm sunlight, comfortable breezes and the unmistakable lowing of Holsteins in the fields. It’s also the time and place where one of the state’s unmistakable brewing juggernauts is winning awards and growing its enterprise.
From its humble beginnings in a former Vietnam-era plastics factory on the Sugar River just outside the bucolic village of New Glarus in 1992, Master Brewer Dan Carey and President Deb Carey, cofounders of New Glarus Brewing Company, have created a distinctive thumbprint on Wisconsin’s brewing industry. It’s a significant achievement given that after trying it once, New Glarus has never distributed its beers outside of Wisconsin. Nonetheless, the brewery on May 2 added three more notches to its mash tun by earning gold, silver and bronze awards from the prestigious World Beer Cup.
Never mind that brewmaster Carey’s prior work has earned 74 international awards from not only the World Beer Cup, but also the Great American Beer Festival, the Brewing Industry International Awards, the Brussels Beer Challenge, and other prestigious international competitions, as well as scoring lots of local and regional competition victories. Each award marks a milestone in Carey’s pursuit of brewing some of the best and most interesting beers worldwide.
“The World Beer Cup is the ‘big dog’ among all the competitions, and the competition gets stiffer every year,” Carey says. “This year a total of 8,375 beers were entered by 1,761 breweries worldwide resulting in 349 winners. The cool thing was that we were able to pull off three of those wins.”
Photo via New Glarus Brewing Co. - Facebook
Champ du Blanc - New Glarus Brewing Co.
Champ du Blanc
The winners in order of the medals they won include:
- Carey’s Kriek, a Gold Medal winner in the Belgian-style sour brown ale category, was spontaneously fermented in the brewery’s large coolship and aged on Door County Balaton cherries. Kriek was released in 2018 as a brewery exclusive, and the Gold Medal variant has been aging gracefully in the brewery’s Wild Fruit Cave ever since.
- Champ Du Blanc took home a Silver Medal in the same category. The sour blonde ale is aged on white grapes and is heavily influenced by Carey’s love of champagne. Champ Du Blanc is also a brewery exclusive brew and became available for purchase only at the brewery starting the week of May 5.
- In the Other Strong Beer category, New Glarus’ Imperial Pilsner took home the Bronze Medal. Currently available throughout Wisconsin, Imperial Pilsner is part of the brewery’s Thumbprint series. The beer, born of Carey’s passion and obsession with crafting perfect Pilsners, is an amped-up version of his year-round brew, New Glarus Pilsner.
“The pilsner is made in an Old World way, with a special decoction mashing and lagering with three different yeast strains and dry-hopped with European hops,” Carey says. “That’s followed by a month of bottle aging.”
Ready for Beer Tourists
The rest of this summer may be quieter, but plans are already afoot to build a new 65,000-square foot visitor center, including increased parking, to cater to the growing number of beer fans and area tourists that visit the area. The beer industry is changing, Carey says, and future success will depend more on the rapport brewers build with customers. The brewery itself also is expanding, leaning more heavily on automation and going from a capacity of 240,000 barrels annually to 300,000 barrels. The new facilities are schedule to open during the summer of 2026.
In addition, the new visitors center will house the brewery’s first-ever distillery dedicated to producing and selling single-malt whiskey, the initial batch of which has been aging in the brewery warehouses since 2016. The relationship between beer and whiskey makes the evolution a natural one for Carey.
“Up to a certain point, beer and whiskey are the same beverage, often coming from the same mash,” Carey explains, adding that generally hops aren’t introduced into the whiskey mash. “But we will have some whiskey with hops in it for a different experience. The whiskey should be well-aged and ready for sale by the summer of 2026.”
That should make next summer an interesting and busy time for the Careys and New Glarus Brewing Co. And who knows just how many more brewing medals the rural Wisconsin brewmaster will earn in the meantime?
