Behind Closed Doors: New Knoxville Brewing Co.

Knoxville Museum of Art
Tennessee Theater
The Orangery
Waste Water Treatment Plant

Five blocks from the Old City proudly sits Knoxville's year-old microbrewery, the New Knoxville Brewing Company. It goes by the same name as its ancestor, whose brewing charter was revoked in 1912 when the government discovered that "Swanky Temperance Brew" was not the nonalcoholic beverage it claimed to be. So, without any pretensions to the contrary, the Brewing Company is finally back in business and producing unashamedly alcoholic beer. Its best-known products, Swanky English Ale, Mild Ale and English Mountain India Pale Ale, just won silver medals at the 1997 World Beer Championships.	The "mash-tun" in this picture basically mooshes all the grains that go into beer and holds 1,500 pounds of grain and water.	Beer sounds a lot less attractive (or maybe more, depending on your tastes) when described as liquid bread. However, that's pretty much what it boils down to (OK, pun intended). Water, yeast, barley, hops, and sundry other grain-like ingredients all combine in giant vats (except they're never called vats; they're fermentors) to make America's favorite accessory to pizza. It takes the full-time dedication of five employees, president Ed Vendely included, to produce the medal-winning beers.
	The head brewer, Al Krushen, is shown here with a scoop of very suspicious-looking glop, which is actually yeast, and which looks very much the same in this vat--er, fermentor. Except that if you were desperate enough to snorkel through eight to 10 inches of yeast in here, you would hit jackpot in the form of 800 gallons of beer.