Sept. 19, 2013

Beer and Big Horses.

First - Happy Birthday Dan!

Don’t usually take dirt roads in carbus but the view can be awesome.

Anheuser-Bush has breweries located all over the country and several international spots.  Their smallest producing US brewery is in Merrimack, NH.  Smallest production but the amount produced is still mindboggling.  Eight million 12oz servings per day. 

 

Tour is free as are the two full glass samples of anything they brew. 

The campus is immaculate with flower beds everywhere that are constantly being tended so everything is always fresh and in full bloom.  There are two soccer fields and a baseball field and lots of grass.  The local community benefits here a lot. 

The Merrimack location has one other item.  It is the home stable of one of Budweiser's three ‘hitches’ of Clydesdale horses.  The other stables are in St. Louis and Fort Collins. Eight horses are used in a team but a stable might have 16 horses or more and travel to events with ten or eleven horses.  As with the rest of the campus, the stable, paddocks, corals, and trails are immaculate.  Everything is clean.  The stable buildings, court yard, stalls, fences, – everything, looks brand new. 

Hay is always FRESH,  Note cleanliness and tidiness of ground.

 

The stalls are cleaner than most peoples living rooms.

Note that stalls are made of hardwood and finished.

 

The room where the horses are bathed is immaculate.  So clean it looks like you could eat off the floor. 

The horses are thoroughly groomed several times a day.  They look as spiffy in a stall as they do in the commercials.  Even the wagons used to train the teams look just like the commercials – brand new.

 

 

We got a special treat on our visit.  As we parked the carbus in the lot and were getting out to go to tour the brewery I looked way down toward the end of the parking lot toward the stable.  I told Sue that she might want to take a few pictures of what was coming.  There was a team of Clydesdales coming up the lot on a training run.  They came the full length of the very long lot, turned right in front of us, and headed back toward the stable.  If we had arrived  a minute earlier we would have been in the building and missed the show.  Coolness continues.

 

 

 

For a camp spot we ended up in the extreme north eastern corner of Massachusetts at a state beach reserve.  Campground is a couple hundred yards from a beach on the Atlantic Ocean. 

We missed the Harvest Moon by a day but still pretty cool.