Great American Beer Festival

We just got back from an incredible few days in Denver, CO where the Brewer's Association was holding their 30th annual Great American Beer Festival.

For those who have never been, GABF is truly a remarkable time and we highly recommend you get there at some point in the future.  Held annually in the convention center in downtown Denver, the hall is filled with thousands of people trying beers from hundreds and hundreds of breweries from all around the United States.  It's an incredible time for us to showcase our beer to people from all over the country who don't typically get to see our beers and even if they do, they never get to see any of the more rare beers...like Oude Tart and Black Tuesday.  

Nothing gives us a better feeling than having a line of people at our booth, super excited to try some of our beers and letting us know how much they enjoy them.  This year we had people at our booth for another reason as well, however.  People came by to take photos because we decided to decorate our booth with loads of images of cats as well as stuffed animal cats and cat toys.  There was no true reasoning behind our cat theme, we just thought it was hilarious.

GABF is not only a festival for tasting interesting beers, but it is the largest commercial beer competition in the world, this year having close to 600 breweries enter a total of 3,930 beers to the various categories.  And of all of those entries, we are very very proud to say we took home two silver medals and one gold medal!  Both Hottenroth and The Wanderer won silver and Papier, our very first anniversary beer and one of the very first batches of beer brewed at The Bruery took a gold medal. 

The fact that two of our sour ales and one of our biggest and most complex bourbon barrel aged strong ales took home awards just gives us that much more faith in our Quercus Maximus project.  As we continue to brew more of these intricate beers, hopefully we can win some more awards in the future!

The Project is under way

Seems like we can't go more than 8 months or so here at The Bruery without taking on a new construction project of some sort. Whether it was building our brewery from the ground up, simply painting the walls and moving in desks to new office space or reconfiguring and building a retail store on our own, we seem to always be busy.

These past few weeks have been no different. We signed the lease on our new warehouse location, affectionately known around here as "The Grove" due to it's street address on Grove Ave, just a few weeks back, but construction has been moving along furiously. The floors were redone and resealed, the insulation in the warehouse was completely redone so that we can cool our barrels efficiently, offices were painted and some of the ceilings were ripped out and repainted in order to give it that cool and trendy 'industrial' feel. Funny that we had to change something in a warehouse office space to make it even more industrial...but it's beginning to look very cool. Besides having enough warehouse space to efficiently store close to 3,000 oak barrels in our current configuration plan (more if we decide to change some of our original thoughts), but the office space is big enough to house a staff about 3 times larger than the one we currently have. It's going to take some getting used to this whole concept of "personal space."

Anyhow...we just wanted to let you know that things are going well with the expansion and Project Quercus Maximus and also let you know that we plan on updating our blog a whole lot more in the coming months. We know it's been left to die a bit, but we hope to resurrect it with information on what's going on around here as well as other cool things about the craft industry, beer and beyond.

Charlotte's Beer

We're brewing a very unique beer today at The Bruery in honor of the newest member of the Famille Rue. Charlotte Rue was born 11 days ago to very happy parents Patrick and Rachel Rue and what better way to celebrate than with a monstrous beer.

The plan is to make this a beer for Charlotte to enjoy herself one day, so we are brewing what we're calling a "bourbon beer". In typical bourbon fashion, we are using a 51% corn mash and that, along with the other malts and sugars, we are hoping will bring this beer somewhere close to 23% or perhaps higher in alcohol. The primary reason we need the gravity on this beer to be so high is because we now plan on aging it in brand new, dark charred barrels for 21 years - ready to be drunk on Charlotte's 21st birthday. Over time, the beer should pick up flavor and color from the char in the same way as a good bourbon would and the final result will be a very strong beer tasting similar to a fine whiskey.

Like many of our beers, this is going to be an interesting experiment and you'll have to stick with us until 2032 to find out what the end result is. Sorry about the wait.

3 French Hens

Our third beer in the 12 Days Of Christmas series is bottled and ready to hit shelves in just a few weeks!

3 French Hens is a Belgian dark strong ale, partially aged in French oak barrels...duh!

We think it's delicious, but we'll let you be the judge.

Cheers!

Fruit Delivery

We just got in an awesome delivery of various fruit to add to a few of our sour beers that are slowly aging away. Raisins, cranberries, tart cherries, grapes, kiwis, raspberries, dates and a whole slew of goodness. We just need to stop snacking on it all before we can get it into the beers.