Beer Town!

The Schell’s brewery is reached by way of a trucker’s nightmare: a narrow twisting ribbon of blacktop that snakes up a wooded hill to the top of the bluffs overlooking the Cotton River on the southern edge of New Ulm. Most of the original brick buildings remain, converted to a museum, a gift shop, and offices. The 1885 mansion serves as a special events facility. Peacocks and their mates strut the grounds and one, a cock named Freddy, announces the comings and goings of commercial vehicles with squawking of remarkable volume. Four whitetails still inhabit the deer park that was one of August Schell’s favorite diversions.

Jodi Marti is married to the great-great-grandson of August. Her official title in the company is a trade secret, but her duties include playing a delightful June Cleaveresque role as cheerful housewife to an entire brewery, taking on such tasks as dropping family recipes into press kits that make it clear why beer was once promoted as a digestive aid. Even if she dines regularly on “sausage-stuffed beef rouladen with beer sauce,” she stays fit maintaining the grounds and gardens with the help of staffer Tammy Anderson. On the morning of my visit, Anderson pointed out the favorite basking spots of the garter snakes who populate the formal gardens. Whimsical sculptures of gnomes play cards under a fieldstone gazebo. The odor of cooking wort from the brewery wafts overhead. What decent beer wouldn’t want a home in a place like this?

Over the years, a number of orphaned beers have come to the Schell’s doorstep, wrapped in blankets, looking for a place to ferment. Twenty-one different beers are now brewed there under contract, including worthy competitor James Page. And now Grain Belt Premium, the only other beer with as much Minnesota history behind it as Schell’s, has made its home there. But Grain Belt Premium is no contract-brewed foster child. Evidence of its full membership in the Schell family arrived on the day of our visit; two flatbed trucks came from St. Cloud bearing a pair of spanking-new stainless steel brewing vats dedicated exclusively to the production of Grain Belt Premium.

To chat about the recent acquisition, I met with Jodi Marti’s husband, Schell’s President Ted Marti. His oak-trimmed, wallpapered office is a remnant of the original August Schell residence now attached to the brewery building. Marti is a soft-spoken guy, a perfect spy in the John LeCarre sense—a man of such average appearance he might have trouble attracting a waiter’s attention in an uncrowded restaurant. But on this day he glowed with paternal pride on the subject of the four-ton cone-shaped vats that will brew nearly 200,000 bottles of GBP every five weeks. Brewmasters know them as “uni-tanks,” which means they are insulated to permit individual temperature regulation. After fermentation, yeast can be drawn off, leaving the beer to age and pre-finish in the same tank. Giant holes were cut in the brewery roof to admit this new state-of-the-art technology, but Marti said it’s worth it for the sake of the beer; older methods might involve as many as three tanks for a single batch. Fewer transfers means better beer.

“Whenever you move beer, there’s always a danger of harming it,” explained Ted Marti.
“Unless it’s moving from the bottle into the consumer,” I pointed out. The fifth-generation brewmaster quite agreed.