sierra nevada brewing company

I don't live in NorCal, so for me to get here I typically fly into Sacramento and then drive to Chico. I have family in Chico, but I would be willing to make the trip even if I did not. Sierra Nevada makes it worthwhile.If you just want to grab some food and wash it down with a pint or two, they have a very nice restaurant attached to the brewery. The food is very good, and you can get a wide range of beers, including stuff that they only distribute locally. (I recommend the fish tacos.)If you want more, you can tour the brewery/brewery grounds. They have a gift shop and a mini-museum of breweraina, which you can just walk in and see, or you can make an appointment for a tour.They offer two styles of tours: a 90-minute tour and a longer "Beer Geek" tour (by appointment only, on Fridays only). The Beer Geek tour is $25, and typically, you do need to tee it up more than a few weeks in advance.I did the Beer Geek tour and completely enjoyed it. Best $25 I ever spent. But you can enjoy a visit here regardless of whether you take a guided tour or not.

An awesome place to relax and have a meal with friends during the week or weekends. It also has the added attraction of being an award winning brewery so be sure to sample the wares.

Enjoy a mouth watering steak, or an appetizer while sipping specialty beers off their beer sampler platter. Then take a tour of how they make their famous beers all in one trip. Make sure you call a couple days ahead to find out the tour schedule. It can get a little crowded at the bar area, so be patient or call for reservations for their restaurant seating inside or outside.

We love to take our out of town friends to Sierra Nevada Brewing. It's fun to tour the brewery and then eat at the restaurant. Their house salad is excellent with candied pecans. I'm not a vegetarian but I love their veggie burger made with lentils. The service is excellent, the prices are reasonable and we're all around pretty proud of Sierra Nevada Brewing Company and all the success they so deserve.

We have toured many breweries and wineries and our experience at Sierra Nevada Brewing Company was absolutely outstanding! ! ! Our tour guide, Chris, was phenomenal, energetic, and compelling. He has great knowledge and passion for the Sierra Nevada product and experience. Brewing quality beer is a complex endeavor and the folks at Sierra Nevada do a great job of explaining the process and making you feel comfortable asking questions to increase your brewing knowledge. The tasting at the end of the tour is generous, and gets you to experience a full range of the beers produced at Sierra Nevada. They have a very complete gift shop (souvenirs) where one can purchase limited release beers which are only available at the brewery.The Sierra Nevada brewery is a destination in and of itself. If you plan to be in the Chico area, and if you care anything about beer, you won't want to miss the opportunity to visit Sierra Nevada Brewing Company. We called last minute, and got a return phone call from Rachel. She was pleasant, and let us know we could replace a cancellation (lucky for us). They have an on-line reservation system, so we would encourage you to plan ahead a few days, but by all means GO on this great tour.

I am a lover of micro beers, I do not enjoy the weak, tasteless slog that Coors or Budweiser puts out. Therefore I am always happy to see microbreweries open up in our state. Sierra Nevada has been here the longest on a national level and when my friends and I went to the brewery, not only did they have fantastic beers on tap that you cannot get anywhere but the brewery, but the food and service was excellent in a nice oak paneled restaurant . The area around Chico also has some historical points of interest including a monk's winery that dates back to the 1850's along with the Bidwell Mansion.

Sierra Nevada Brewing is a wonderful part of Chico, and a must see if you have time to enjoy good beer and food to go along with it. Ken Grossman who started the brewery has put together a wonderful team,and making beer is a passion for them. I love their IPA's, but if your a beer lover they make one you will like, and making friends at the bar is part of the charm. They give tours of the brewery and show how it's made, the equipment comes from Kitzingen Germany,also people who know how to make beer. It's a fun tour, and worth the time to do it, and if it makes you hungry just stop in their restaurant for a meal. It's a great place to visit if your in town and would like some great beer too, this is the place for you.

After a day of shopping i stopped by the Brewery for lunch and it was great. I had a juicy hamburger with a very generous side of a wonderful pasta salad. The pasta salad wasn't sweet and mayonaisey, but rather light and flavorful. The waitress was very nice and attentive to our needs without hovering. The resturaunt was busy and noisy with lots of holiday energy. The Brewery offers an incredible tour.. I am not a beer drinker but the tour was very informative and fun.

We thoroughly enjoyed this tour after failing to tour the Anchor Steam Brewery in San Francisco (available tours too far ahead) and the North Coast Brewery in Fort Bragg (no tours at the time of our visit to Fort Bragg). Our tour guide Chris was excellent being very informative answering all our questions, the icing on the cake being the free sampling of a number of brews. The attached tap room looked as if they served good food, we would have liked to eat there but did not have enough time.

Happened to be in town for a birthday celebration and since they were all meeting at a location I am not fond of we decided to get to town early and try this place out. It was Saturday and rather busy and we were lucky enough to get in on a tour so we just sat at the bar and ordered a few things. Hubby ordered a cheeseburger and I ordered the pretzels. The pretzels were to die for and the warm melty beer cheese was fantastic! They are real pretzels with that firm brown exterior and chewy insides! YUMMY. The fries that came with the burger were very good and hubby's burger had the beer cheese as well which he really appreciated. Burger looked very well sized and hubby was surprisingly able to take it down no problem. The place is really busy on Saturdays, an hour wait is typical. There was a really long line at the door, we expected this but since we didn't make it in town as early as we wanted to, we were just lucky enough to catch a few people leaving and got seats at the bar and served there, but it was at least 2 deep all around the bar since so many people were getting beers while they were waiting for tables. The food looked spectacular and I wish we had more time to try more but the tour was scheduled and we didn't want to risk it. Our tour guide RACHEL was absolutely FABULOUS!! She was so knowledgable about the history of the place and the owner and the beer I was really impressed with her knowledge and enthusiasm for the brand and her place of employment. I learned a LOT on the tour and I would certainly do it again when the production facility was up and running Monday-Friday. I so enjoyed our visit here I will certainly be back when in town again and so glad I found this place since I usually hate coming to Chico to visit the in-laws. So now I have a place to come to and look forward to our visits and just come early and come here again! :) Oh for you beer drinkers the tours are free and you get to try several beers at the end and its very entertaining and educational as well even for us non beer drinkers I was able to find one I liked and was surprised by the variety of flavors and colors available. Very much worth your time I recommend to anyone coming through town or even the locals who haven't been on the tour before (if thats even possible). See you again soon. Can't wait!

We've visited several breweries and this is by far the best. It's entertaining, interesting and educational. Our guide, Chris, was great. Good sense of humor and knows his stuff. You can tell he loves his job. Sierra Nevada is extremely eco-friendly. You can learn about everything they have done to protect the environment. And then at the end of the tour you can taste 8 wonderful brews. This tour is not for little kids. It also takes about 90 minutes. The beers are great so beware of the gift shop. Once you have tried the beers you will be hooked. Be sure to make a reservation for the tour.They also have a wonderful restaurant as part of the facility - The Taproom. The food was excellent and the staff very friendly.

I've had the opportunity to tour many breweries, distilleries and wineries but my experience at Sierra Nevada Brewing Company was the greatest of all. Our tour guide, Chris, was phenomenal. For such a young gentleman, he has great knowledge and passion for the Sierra Nevada product and experience. While you won't have a choice of tour guides, if you are fortunate enough to have your tour lead by Chris, you'll also be impressed.Brewing quality beer can be a somewhat complex endeavor and the folks at Sierra Nevada do a great job of explaining the process and making you feel comfortable asking questions to increase your brewing knowledge. They also have a very complete gift shop where you can buy souvenirs and also purchase limited release beers which are only available at the brewery.The Sierra Nevada brewery is a destination in and of itself. Whether you plan a trip based around this tour - as we did - or whether you're simply fortunate to be in the Chino area, if you care anything about beer, you won't want to miss the opportunity to visit Sierra Nevada Brewing Company.

The beer we keep at home is Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. We have driven from the SF area to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival for years. We decided to make a detour this trip to Chico to see where our go to beer is made. Impressive facility, with thousands of solar panels and fuel cell generators providing much of the power they need. They also capture waste CO2 to put back into their process (I think the kegs). You learn about hops, malt and the beer making process. Get to handle some dried hops. watch the bottling. then taste about 7 different brews. Loved the Estate brew, with fresh, undried hops. the coffee brew was just a bit too strange for me!Many of the rooms are noisy, and our guide talked pretty fast, so I know I missed some details. But i got enough to have a really enjoyable tour, and to be impressed by the attention Sierra Nevada Brewing Company (privately held) is paying to the environmental impact of its process.

It was a really interesting tour but I think it was above and beyond because of our guide,Mike. He was very dedicated to his job which makes for a very interesting tour. I am not a beer drinker but had fun and even did the tasting (still not liking beer). If in the area you need to take this tour and hopefully you get Mike as you guide!

Used to love this place and always stopped when passing through. The food and service were always excellent and the beer, of course. But...the last 2 trips have dissuaded us from going back. On one visit we sat in the waiting room for 20 minutes with our buzzer device. We noticed that there were many open tables in the dining room with many wait staff milling about. We were eventually seated at a table that had been empty since we began waiting. Our waitress was relatively pleasant, but disappeared for long periods of time. Took way too long to get a beer. The food was plain awful on both visits. Pizza was bland, fish and chips was crumbly and way over priced, eggplant dish was undercooked with layer of plastic-like cheese, fries were inedible, salty. The beer remains excellent.