During a recent visit to his hometown of Boston, Conan O’Brien took a tour of the Sam Adams Brewery — even though he is decidedly not a beer nerd. The late night host’s reactions during this segment will surely resonate with anyone who’s ever been bored to tears while either taking a brewery tour, or talking shop with a bunch of beer geeks.
At the start of the tour, Conan meets Sam Adams co-founder Jim Koch, who launches into a long screed about the 12,000 year history of beer. When he lands on a bit about the Mayflower, Conan interrupts him. “I’m going to stop you for a second — you’ve got to tighten it up a little bit,” Conan says. “You’re taking me through day by day.” And when a fellow brewer tells Conan that he’s heard Jim’s story before, the comedian quips, “So you’ve heard it twice in 25 years — it’s a long story.”
After learning about how “hops are the closest botanical relative to marijuana,” Conan visits the brewery floor, where a bunch of young men are fast at work. “This is an adult version of Santa’s workshop,” Conan says. As a fellow named Eryn Bottens is telling Conan about the nano brewery operations, the host gets distracted by the fact that the brewer and all of his co-workers are sporting impressive beards. “It looks like the police are coming,” Conan says to one guy with a shoulder-length beard. “They’ve got a picture of you, and you quickly clip this thing on.”
At the end of his tour, Bottens offers O’Brien tiny tastes of all the beers that are made at the Sam Adams brewery, but the host quickly gets fed up with sipping all the samples, and starts drawing shots into a pitcher. The finished product is what he describes as “the Conan brew: a simple blend of 26 randomly selected beers.” Although the comedian is clearly pleased with his creation, Jim Koch tastes the concoction and determines that it’s “a mess.”
Conan recently switched up the format of his TBS late night show so that it’s now just a half an hour long as opposed to an hour, and leans more heavily on these outside-the-studio segments. This week’s brewery tour and last week’s visit to Olive Garden suggest that perhaps O’Brien will also be focusing a bit more on the food and drink world with his new late night show.
Watch the entire brewery tour in the clip above.
• Conan Visits the Sam Adams Brewery [YouTube]
• Watch Conan Take His Italian Food Snob Friend to the Olive Garden [E]
