Hi, everyone, and thanks a lot for coming out for a tour of the Hale Valley Brewery—one of just seventeen microbreweries in Litchfield County, Connecticut, that has the word “Valley” in its name. Hopefully, this roughly seven-minute tour will make you feel like you’re doing something educational and productive with your weekend, as opposed to just getting drunk at 2:15 P.M. on a Saturday. Is everybody ready to get started?
Great! Let’s begin with some background info about Hale Valley. Our historic brewery was founded all the way back in 2014 by Philip Adams and Adam Philips. The pair met as fraternity brothers at Dartmouth and became fast friends upon realizing that they both liked beer and had virtually identical trust funds. The way the story goes is that, right before graduation, Philip told Adam he was worried that his dad would make him take a job at Morgan Stanley if he didn’t cobble together something vaguely reminiscent of a business plan, and they decided that opening a microbrewery would be easier than following through on their idea for a startup that combined dog-walking and tech somehow. And just like that—Hale Valley was born. Pretty cool, huh?
Adam and Philip—or “Phil,” as we call him around here, given how cool and relaxed our work culture is—decided to open up their microbrewery in Litchfield County because, as soon as they saw how beautiful it was here, they knew it was the only place where they could make their beer taste as great as they had always imagined. Also, Adam’s dad already owned the land, so all they needed to do to set up shop was shut down the family-owned pet store that had been in this space since the nineteen-twenties.
Please do not ask us what happened to the pets!
Now we’re going to start the tour in what we call the “brewing room,” where you’ll have the opportunity to sample individual beer ingredients on their own, when they all still taste bad and nonalcoholic. We craft our beer using a totally unique combination of ingredients that includes barley, hops, bro culture, a completely unearned feeling of superiority, and water.
These ingredients are responsible for some of our brewery’s most famous beers, such as the Hazy Hale Amber Ale, the Vicious Valley Chocolate Stout, and the My Company Was Never Found Criminally Responsible for the 2007-08 Financial Crisis I.P.A.
Fun fact: Phil’s dad said that he would only help fund the brewery if he got to name one of the beers. See if you can guess which one he picked!
Now, has anyone ever wondered how we get our delicious beer into its cans? No? Good. Then we can skip that room.
So that means that the next and last stop on our tour—yes, it really is over already!—is the gift shop, which is filled with all sorts of fun items that will let people know you have been to the Hale Valley Brewery and will essentially view them as war criminals if you ever catch them drinking a Bud Light. You can get a baseball cap with “Hale Valley Brewery” on it, for instance. Or you can get a tank top with “Hale Valley Brewery” on it. And, in the spirit of giving back, five per cent of the money you spend on all purchases here will go directly toward supporting Hale Valley Hearts, a charity that Adam’s dad founded to help find cures for diseases he’s worried he might get someday.
This concludes our tour. Feel free to spend the rest of your day here drinking our beers in the tasting room—it’s like a bar, only everything is way more expensive—and wondering why you didn’t just skip the tour and go straight to the tasting room in the first place. I ask myself that same question every day. Thanks for coming!
