Expansion Update 4: More Warehouse Space = Improved Quality

The addition of our brand new brewhouse from Germany means some things will need to move around inside our current spaces. We're pleased to announce that another step in our expansion plans for 2014 includes the lease of two new warehouse spaces, which means separation of clean beer and sour beer fermentation and packaging.

At the end of January, we leaked a sneak peek at one of our new warehouse spaces located near our administrative offices. This warehouse is pretty cavernous and will be used for marketing department raves the less glamorous parts of the wonderful world of brewing, like bottle conditioning and storage of packaging materials.

One of our new warehouses, showing itself off in the sunset.

The interior of that same new warehouse

For a long while, The Bruery was contained only at Dunn Way. The brewery that stands today is still in its original footprint, but as we've grown we've pushed into more units within this building. We eventually spilled out into two other warehouses that are not connected to the building at Dunn Way.

Our beloved Tasting Room at 717 Dunn Way in Northern Orange County

One warehouse is just steps away from the brewery & Tasting Room and it is used for our storage, shipping, waxing, and has a couple offices. We'll call this Bldg #2. The other warehouse, which we'll call Bldg #3, is about 3 miles away from Dunn Way and is a warehouse connected to offices from which our behind-the-scenes, desk-dwelling Bruers work.

Our warehouse supervisor JD using some TLC on Chocolate Rain shipments in Bldg #2

Bldg #3 currently has one section filled floor to ceiling with sour barrels, and one section filled floor to ceiling with clean barrels, which are new oak, bourbon, rye, and other spirit barrels. This shared warehouse is in the process of being changed as you read this. Our sour and funky barrels will soon takeover the entire warehouse and be joined by both of our Meheen bottling lines which will only package sour beer. While both sour (wort only) and clean beer production will still happen at the brewery at Dunn Way, sour fermentation and packaging will only happen at Bldg #3.

Any given day in our warehouse connected to our administrative offices

This means those clean barrels are migrating to a new home miles away from sour beer fermentation and packaging. Across the street from Bldg #2 we have leased a new space that is now insulated and already home to a large portion of our clean barrels. We'll have some more office and meeting space available too, which means we can move and expand our already stellar Bruery lab, too!

Our new clean barrel warehouse, and its first occupants coming in

With the addition of these two warehouses we'll be bumping our number of separate facilities from three to five. This step to separate sour & funky beers from clean beer is critical for us in order to keep our beer quality as high as possible across the board. We’ll be able to make a wider range of sour and funky beers, and we'll have even more staff focused on these beers that we’re so passionate about.

We're always thinking of ways to utilize our space to the best of our ability, so hopefully in time we can develop even more positive changes in our improved spaces as we grow.

Read more blogs about our ongoing expansion plans for 2014

• Expansion Update 1: Hello New Kosme Bottling Line!
• Expansion Update 2: Clarified, But Never Filtered Craft Beer
• Expansion Update 3: A Bigger, Better, More Efficient Brewhouse