March 9, 2006 [ Updated January 4, 2007 ]
This place is what a nanobrewery is all about. The brewery is in the basement of a beat-up turn-of-the-century building that appears to be at about 20% capacity. The tour is extremely thorough; it’s a lot more than just "here’s our brewing tanks, here’s our lagering tanks, here’s our bottling line, take a few sips and get out." Instead you get a very detailed treatise on the process of brewing beer. All told from beginning to completion of tasting, it was a 2-hour affair. Your patience is rewarded with free samples of some 15 different Viking varieties. They were all quite good at the time (spring 2005) but the quality of Viking products has become rather uneven since. Major downside is no gift shop; no glasses, no T-shirts, ballcaps, and they cannot sell on-premise either. There is a combined restaurant/bar/liquor store about half a block away that sells whatever’s seasonally available, either in individual bottles or in 4-packs. Overall it was quite a neat experience and I’d generally recommend it, even if their beer has become a bit uneven lately.