For those that don’t know, I am a bartender at Wahlburgers. It’s the famous burger place owned by Mark and Donnie Wahlberg’s family. If you haven’t heard of it, I’m sure there will be a one in your city soon. They have over 400 contracted restaurants to open up across the world in the next couple of years.  It’s also a TV show, in its eighth season on A&E. I’m very fortunate to be working on the strip and making decent money, with a job that allows me to take time off to travel often. I am even more fortunate to have some awesome managers, who really care about the business. My main manager is really into our bar menu and he has decided to turn towards more craft and local breweries to stock our shelves, rather than large domestic companies. Since they’re filling our keg room with local breweries a lot of people are unfamiliar with, even some of us that work there, my boss thought it would be a great idea to increase our beer knowledge.

Our first lesson was held at Tenaya Creek Brewery. Tenaya Creek has been in Las Vegas since 1999 and started as a restaurant. When they decided to start brewing craft beers they started to expand their brewery as their beers became more popular. Now you can find them in the middle of town right next to the 95 and the I-15. They have numerous year-round beers and some seasonal ones. My personal favorite is their Craft Pilsner. Wahlburgers has their Tandem Double IPA on tap.

My boss told us to bring whoever we wanted, so of course, I brought my mom who hasn’t been on a brewery tour since we did Coors years ago. Only one other bartender showed up and three servers. It was a small group and I was shocked more coworkers didn’t want to come for the free beer. There was a decent crowd in there for a Monday night, especially considering the location of the place. I think they said they have 27 beers on tap, 15 of them being their own beers. Before we got started they gave us each a glass of their Pilsner and another glass of their Oktoberfest Lager.

Once we went into the brewery our host walked us through the process of how beer is made. He had us sample some barley and showed us all the different flavors of hops. Our favorite part was seeing how the canning station works. My mom is old school and thought beer in cans is not as good, but our host changed her mind on that. She had a great time though and was glad she came even though neither of us are big beer drinkers.

The tour lasted for a little over an hour and probably was longer for us since we could share about how the beer sells with the host. He answered all our questions, and we had a lot, haha. After the tour he let us try any beer of theirs we wanted and we were not scared to try all that we wanted. It was very informative and I feel like I will be able to sell the beer better now that I have so much knowledge about it. I personally love the fact that craft beers are taking off. There are so many small, but great breweries out there and I applaud my boss for giving them a chance in such a busy restaurant.

If you are a local you should definitely check out Tenaya Creek Brewery, even if it’s just to have a couple beers there. They do offer public tours once a month if you wanted to see how the process works. They don’t serve food, but most days of the week they have food trucks parked outside and on Saturday night it is a pretty poppin’ place. Some nights they do a pub quiz and they have even have done yoga classes in their brewery room.

If you see a Tenaya Creek beer at a bar you’re at, give it a try, it might end up being your new favorite drink.