Abita Brewing Co
Founded in 1986, the Abita Brewing Company is nestled in the
piney woods 30 miles north of New Orleans.
In its first year, the brewery produced 1,500 barrels of beer. We had
no idea what we started. Customers loved our beer! By 1994, we
outgrew the original site (now our 100 seat brew pub) and moved up
the road to a larger facility to keep up with demand.
We brew over 90,000 barrels of beer and 5,000 barrels of root beer in
our state of the art brewing facility. Our lagers and ales are brewed in
small batches, hand-crafted by a team of dedicated workers with only
the highest ideals of quality. This pride, along with our brewing
process, is what creates our great brews.
We are privately owned and operated by local shareholders, many
who have been with us since day one.
Abita uses only the finest ingredients - British and North American
malted barley, German and American yeast strains, Pacific Northwest
hops and the pure artesian water of Abita Springs.
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In Abita, we are blessed with the purest of water. Drawn from our deep wells, our pristine water is not altered in any way.
Abita Beer has no preservatives, additives or stabilizers and is cold filtered. The result is beer that is the finest and freshest tasting as proven by our loyal customers and great chefs of the south who use Abita Beer in their recipes.
We're proud of our brewery and the beers we make. Try Abita Beer today and taste a bit of the South!
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 Since the turn of the century, people have been traveling to Abita Springs, Louisiana, for pure, clean-tasting water. Thus, with its fitting natural resources and small-town southern charm, it became clear to us that Abita Springs would be the perfect place to pioneer the freshest and most unique tasting beers available today.
Established in 1986, Abita Brewing Company is proud to be the oldest craft brewery in the southeast and one of the oldest craft breweries in the United States. Today, Abita Brewing Company is poised to go from one of the top microbreweries in the country to a nationally renowned household beer.
Your Abita Brewery tour experience takes approximately one hour. Everyone 21 years of age or older is welcome to visit the Abita Brewery. Closed toe shoes are required to tour the brew house. If you have a group of 20 or more please contact kathy@abita.com to schedule an alternate tour time. |
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Brewery Hours & Tour Times
Wed,Thurs & Fri: 2pm - 3pm
Tour Time: 2pm
Sat: 10am - 3pm
Tour Times: 11am, 12pm, 1pm & 2pm
Sun: No tours
March 27th: 1pm & 2pm tours cancelled.
June 12th: All tours cancelled.
Click here for maps & directions
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The Tasting Room is where all tours of the Abita Brewery begin and end. Pass through the ornamental iron gates into the gas lit courtyard garden. Inside the French doors you can take a seat at the 24 foot polished mahogany bar and enjoy samples of every Abita Beer currently available. View Abita-inspired art and shop for Abita Beer merchandise. |
There are only four main ingredients in Abita Beer: Water, Barley, Yeast, and Hops. Just four simple ingredients combine to create over a dozen very different brews. Nothing artificial ever goes into Abita Beer, we use only all natural ingredients. The precise recipe and timing of the brews are controlled by the Brewmaster (an impressive title for a pretty fantastic job) and the result is the wonderful variety of Abita beers you've come to know and love.
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 Let's start with the water. It's the reason the Abita Brewing Company is located in beautiful Abita Springs, Louisiana. While most other breweries must filter and chemically treat their water for the brewing process, Abita does neither. We take ours straight from the source. Our water is drawn from a deep artesian well in the Southern Hills aquifer system. Over 3,000 feet deep in some areas, it contains fresh water kept pristine in underground structures that are more than five million years old. Our water has been tested and shown to be free of man-made pollutants, including Tritium, a man-made radioactive isotope that marks all surface waters.
Since its days as a Choctaw Indian settlement, Abita's spring water has been a cherished natural resource. The Choctaws used it for medicinal purposes, and tourists at the turn of the century flocked to the springs to "take the water" and recuperate from yellow fever.
A story is told of a young Spaniard named Henriques who lived in Louisiana during the late 1790s. While hunting along the shores of Lake Pontchartrain, he met a beautiful Choctaw girl and persuaded the chief to allow them to marry. After bringing her home to New Orleans, Henriques watched his wife grow pale and weak and soon he realized that she was very ill.
None of the local doctors could cure her so Henriques finally consulted the Choctaws' medicine man. The young woman was carried to the spring and left there with only a hammock, food and a dipper to drink from the spring. When Henriques returned, to his amazement, his wife was totally well and the water's fame as a curative began to spread.
Word of the wonderful water spread to neighboring communities and in 1887, the first railroad arrived to the area. Boarding houses, hotels and restaurants were soon constructed to accommodate visitors. In 1903, the town of Abita Springs was formally organized, and later chartered in 1912.
Take a sip from one of the water fountains inside the Abita Brewery and you are tasting the same pure water we pump from the ancient source for our beer. There's no place like home when it comes to brewing Abita Beer.
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 The sheaves you see on the Abita logo are not wheat, but good old barley. Barley can be eaten as a grain and it is sometimes used in soups and stews. Barley is good for you - it's full of fiber. Barley is also very good for something else: making beer. Barley is to beer as grapes are to wine. But before the barley goes into Abita Beer it must be malted.
Malting is a way of processing any cereal grain. Here's how it works: grains of barley are seeds. The barley seed is moistened, and like any other seed, it begins to grow. The barley is then quickly heated in a large oven, called a kiln, to stop the growing process.
Malting the barley develops the enzymes in the grain that are needed to turn barley starch into barley sugar. Malted grain is also used to make whisky and malt vinegar too. Barley gets the malting treatment more than any other grain because it has a thick outer husk that stands up to all that soaking, sprouting and roasting. The wheat in our Abita Wheat seasonal brew is malted too. Malting is a complicated process and takes years of training and experience to master.
Abita acquires their barley already malted. We use only two-row barley grown specifically for brewing. Two-row refers to the way barley kernels are arranged on the stalk. Two-row barley has a fuller, maltier flavor than inferior six row varieties. Seems picky, but we want the best for our beer. We search the world for the very best and currently use barley from North America, the United Kingdom and Germany. Our malt varieties include Pale, Crystal, Lager, Wheat and Chocolate Malt and numerous specialty malts. |
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Yeast is a single celled microorganism that converts sugar into two by-products: alcohol and carbon dioxide. We call that neat trick fermentation. Yeast has been used for making bread and beer for thousands of years.
There are two types of yeast: ale and lager. Lagers ferment from the bottom of the tank at colder temperatures and make a smoother, more well rounded beer. Ales ferment from the top at warmer temperatures and make a beer with more esters. Esters are compounds that produce pleasant aromas like fruit and cloves. Abita uses several kinds of specialized brewers yeasts from around the world, including German Lager, German Ale, Belgian Ale, Californian Ale and other specialty yeasts that are cultivated in labs specifically for Abita beer. |
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 Hops are the flowers of the hop plant. They grow on a climbing vine and look more like a green pine cone than a rose or a daisy. Hops are often grown in areas that also produce wine grapes, such as the Willamette and Yuchana valleys in the Pacific Northwest. They balance the sweetness of the malted barley, they are a natural preservative and they add flavors and aromas to the brew. Alpha acids in the hops determine the bitterness content. Hops can be described with words like "grassy", "floral", "citrus", "spicy", "piney" and "earthy". Hop flavor is subtle in most beers.
Hops are used at three different stages in the beer making process. Bittering hops are added first to offset natural sweetness. During the boiling process, flavoring hops are added to give a well-rounded hop flavor and aroma. At the end of the boil, even more hops are added for additional aromas in the finished beer. To get a stronger taste of the hops, try an Abita Restoration Pale Ale or an Abita Jockamo I.P.A. |
Abita Brewing Company
Corporate HQ
PO Box 1510
Abita Springs, LA 70420
If you are making a donation request it is required that you complete the
Charitable Donation Request Form before calling.
CORPORATE CONTACT INFORMATION
Abita Brewing Company Corporate HQ
PO Box 1510
Abita Springs, LA 70420 |
| Phone: |
800-737-2311 ext 201, 202, or 206 |
| Email: |
friends@abita.com |
ORDER INQUIRIES
| Distributor POS: |
800-737-2311 ext 207 |
| Product: |
800-737-2311 ext 213 |
| Online Orders: |
800-737-2311 ext 201 |
DISTRIBUTION REQUESTS / INFO
SALES SUPPORT
| 800-737-2311 ext 207 |
| 985-893-3143 |
ADVERTISING INQUIRIES
The Abita Brewing Company is committed to being an important part of the community. We are pleased to donate products and merchandise to non-profit groups to aid in their fundraising efforts whenever possible.
Please click here and complete the Charitable Donation Request Form
Due to the heavy volume of inquiries, please allow up to 4 weeks for a response to your request.