Tuesday, June 18, 2013

HomebRued from Batch 1 to 1000, and Beyond!

For milestone batches like our first, 50th, 300th, and now our 1000TH BREW!!!, we've asked you guys to enter beers in our homebrew competitions. After the best recipe was selected, we brewed a limited quantity at our place with the winning homebrewers.



We're pretty excited about brewing our 1000th batch of beer this year. The recipe for our upcoming Batch 1000 comes from Brian Pramov & Bryan Keas of Denver, CO. Their hoppy dark rye, Night Ryder, won this round's competition beating out 199 other entries. In the spirit of Batch 1000, we'll be profiling some of our very own hombrewers homebruers on our staff in the coming weeks here on our Bruery Blog.

The Batch series began back in the pre-Tylerian era, when Patrick was a lone wolf/brewer at The Bruery. An impassioned homebrewer, Pat reached out to the homebrew community to compete for the winning recipe for Batch 1, a process which is well chronicled in this blog's archives. The wise words of Patrick the Great still hold strong today, “We are excited to bring the spirit and innovation of homebrewing into our new brewery from its inception. We're still avid homebrewers ourselves and we strongly believe homebrewing is a significant part of what keeps craft beer interesting.”


Fast-forward 999 batches, and we have Brian+Bryan (shall we call them Briyan?) from CO trying their hand at winning the Batch 1000 recipe. Brian started brewing about 3 1/2 years ago. Both Briyans have placed in the Colorado State Fair and currently have a beer in the final round of the National Homebrew Competition.

"The premise of the recipe started with our local homebrew club doing an annual competition within the club where you were paired with an experienced member (Bryan) and someone that's new to the club (me)," explains Brian. "We created a Cascadian dark ale two years ago and won the little competition. We had such a good time brewing the beer and enjoyed it so much we decided to make the recipe again last year but wanted to go imperial and to add rye to it. Bryan has a way with making great hoppy ales and I've been very successful in making rye beers so we decided to conjure up a recipe utilizing both those skills of ours. The style itself, if you can call that beer a style, isn't very widespread so I thought the Specialty category would be perfect for this beer to enter at the Bruery."

Bryan pointed out that, "before this competition that we have had several first place beers and come close to getting a Best of Show, but never made it out on top until now. I am very happy and excited to know that great things can happen to those who are patient and persistent. I think it is safe to say that even if Brian and I had won one or more best of shows previously, we would happily trade them in for an opportunity like this."

Keep an eye out for Batch 1000 later in July/August, as we plan to release it only to CA and CO. We're already thinking up some special events in both So. Cal and Denver, part of which includes deporting Ben to Colorado later this week and watching Cambria drive into the dawn towards CO in July. Next week he will be at Choice City Butcher in Fort Collins to chat all things Bruery over a couple of our beers. Good riddance, Benjamin!

We have some more fun planned for once Batch 1000 is all packaged up later August, plus we'll be hanging with Brian+Bryan at GABF in October, so stay tuned.


Our past Batch series beers include:

Batch 1 Levud's
The first ever batch brewed by The Bruery, Batch No. 1 is the result of a homebrew contest we held in order to determine our first batch. Loren Miraglia and Mark Graham entered a fantastic Belgian-style Golden Strong Ale that captured the judges' attention. Batch No. 1 has a pepper-like spiciness and fruit forward flavors of pear and apricot. It is deceptively potent and will continue improving with age.
ABV: 11%, IBU: 20, SRM: 6, Release: One Time Only
Read Patrick's blogpost about homebrewing with Mark & Loren

Batch 50 G.F.A.R.
In January of 2009, a homebrewer and microbiologist named Al Buck won our Batch #50 homebrew contest with his incredibly complex gueuze-style ale. We knew this beer wouldn’t be easy to re-create, but the perfect layers of classic barnyard funk and lactic sourness were impossible to resist. Nearly 3 years later, after brewing the beer once in 2009 and a second batch in 2010, after adding various strains of wild yeasts and bacteria to the barrels and the bottles, after blending multiple batches back together and well beyond our release of Batch #300, we’re finally prepared to release Batch #50 – Grand Funk Aleroad. Brewed in the classic Belgian Gueuze tradition of barrel aging and blending multiple vintages of lambic-style ale, Batch #50 is one of the most rewarding beers we’ve ever had the opportunity to brew.
ABV: 5.8%, Release: One Time Only
Watch clips of Batch 50 being brewed

Batch 300 Tripel
Grant Phillips was the winner of our Batch 300 homebrew contest and rightfully so. Grant came down and helped us brew his recipe for an oaked tripel brewed with the ever so popular Citra hops. We had a ton of fun judging this beer and brewing beer and we think it's a great example of homebrewing ingenuity.
ABV: 8.2%, Release: One Time Only
Read more about our Batch 50 entries

Batch 1000 BRYEIAN ...  more to come!


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