If you like beer, and you’re short on funds — in other words, if you’re a college student — the Redhook Brewery in Woodinville, Wash., might be your kind of place. For just $1, you can take a guided tour of the brewery, and along the way, get between five and eight 5.5-ounce samples of Redhook beers.

Valerie Hackett, tour specialist, has worked at Redhook for two years.

“I was a bartender for a couple of years, and I really started getting into beer,” she said. “I saw a posting on Craigslist for a tour guide [at the brewery] and thought it would be perfect.”

Hackett is one of two full-time tour specialists working at the brewery.

To start off the tour, she gave an overview of what we’d be doing: “We’ll start out by drinking a beer. Then, we’ll talk about the history of Redhook, and then drink a beer. Then we’ll talk about the ingredients of beer, and then drink a beer. We’ll talk about fermentation, drink a beer and go see the bottling hall and drink a beer.”

People on the tour seemed pretty enthusiastic about that itinerary.

Over the course of the tour, we tasted Slim Chance, Sunrye, Redhook ESB, Longhammer IPA and Double Black Stout, a beer that is flavored with coffee and contains caffeine.

“I love everything about beer,” said Jim Worthing of Redmond, Wash. “Here I can learn about it and drink it all at the same time. It’s great!”

Redhook Brewery was founded in 1981 by Paul Shipman and Gordon Bowker. Shipman had worked at the Chateau Ste. Michelle winery but really wanted to get into beer, and Bowker was one of the co-founders of Starbucks. They realized that Washington state drank more draft beer than any other state in the country, and that at the heart of all that drinking was Ballard.

“They found out Ballard was full of drunk Scandinavian fishermen,” Hackett said. “So they decided to go there.”

The new brewery quickly ran out of space at its original location and purchased warehouses across the street. In order to get the beer to the warehouses, Shipman and Bowker built what Hackett called the “beer lover’s dream”: an underground beer pipeline.

From there, the brewery continued to grow and moved once more before coming to its current home in Woodinville, coincidentally right across the street from the Chateau Ste. Michelle winery. Redhook also has a brewery in Portsmouth, N.H., which provides Redhook beers to the east-of-the-Mississippi region.

Redhook beer is now distributed to 48 states and Japan. Hackett asks the group if anyone knows which two states are left out. One gentleman guesses Utah and, for his right answer, gets another beer sample. The other state is Oklahoma. It turns out that those two states have laws on the books requiring any beverage with a 3.2 percent or higher alcohol content to be purchased at a liquor store at room temperature. Since most beers are about 5 percent alcohol by volume, those laws make those states less-than-appealing to marketers, said Hackett.

“And to beer drinkers,” she adds with a laugh.

That was it for history, so we moved on to the ingredients that go into making beer. There are four, and again, Hackett asked questions along the way, offering more beer for any right answers. The ingredients are water, malted grain — barley, in this case — hops and yeast.

Eighty percent of Redhook’s hops come from the Yakima Valley, Hackett said, which is also the second-largest producer of hops in the world. She had a glass jar of hops on her bar and offered it up for a smell. She warned that some people can’t stop smelling them, and that we may wonder why the hops “smell like college.”

“I don’t know what you all were doing in college,” Hackett said, “but hops are the closest known cousins of the marijuana plant. But they don’t work that way, so don’t steal them.”

Hackett also mentioned that there is a type of antioxidant that is only found in hops and is apparently helpful in fighting cancer.

As she explained the brewing process, Hackett pointed out that the yeast strain that Redhook uses in its beer production was developed by a UW graduate student years ago, and that the same strain is still in use.

Next, we were off to the brewing room, where the barley malt is ground in the malt mill and mixed with warm water. The mixture is called mash and gets heated and stirred for two hours, allowing the usable material to separate from the unusable. Then, it’s all sent over to the lauter tun, where it is strained. The liquid leftover is called wort. Besides being used for beer, wort is also the base for whiskey.

The wort is boiled in a brew kettle for about 45 minutes. During this process, hops are added to impart bitterness and counteract the sugars naturally found in the malted barley. Once boiled, the wort is sent to the whirlpool to again separate out unwanted solids from the liquid and is then sent on to a cooling tank.

Now begins the fermentation process. We got another beer and moved into another room, this one overlooking the fermentation tanks. Redhook has 56 such tanks, each of which holds 8,300 gallons of beer.

“If you drink four pints of beer everyday, it would take 33 years to drink through one of those tanks,” Hackett said.

In the fermentation tanks, yeast is added to the wort and kept at a stable 68 degrees Fahrenheit. Hackett explained, in laymen’s terms, how the yeast works.

“Basically, yeast is a little organism that eats the sugar in the wort and then poops out alcohol and farts out carbon dioxide,” she said. “That’s the stuff that makes beer so great. Isn’t that cool?”

Our last stop was the bottling hall, which looks like some sort of amusement park ride or Rube Goldberg machine. Empty, naked bottles start out in cases on pallets at one end. Through an entirely mechanized process, the other end of the line produces finished cases of beer. The first stop is the de-palletizer, then the uncaser, the filler, the labeler and the case packer.

“I’m always hesitant to use the technical industry terms,” Hackett said, “but you all seem to be following along pretty well.”

The bottling hall only requires four people on the floor at any one time, just to make sure nothing goes wrong, and is capable of processing 21,000 bottles per hour. That’s 875 cases of beer rolling off the line every hour.

Hackett leaves us with a bit of wisdom to wrap up the tour:

“Drinking beer is good for you,” she said. “You keep yourself hydrated, get some vitamins and fight cancer every time you drink it.”

Reach features editor Randy Ferreiro at features@dailyuw.com.