The Bruery returns to the Beer Bloggers Conference, this time with Bruery Terreux, too

Our marketing team of Benjamin Weiss and Cambria Griffith headed down to San Diego last weekend not for Comic-Con, nor for the Yu-Gi-Oh! Championship series, and not even for BronyCon. We went to beer blogger paradise at this year's Beer Bloggers Conference, a three day journey through time and space with beer fans and writers from all over the nation.

The party began late on Thursday night with a very private hang out session in our barrel warehouse at the future home of Bruery Terreux.

10 Steps to Better Beer Photography

Now that you've perfected your beer writing skills, you want to perfect your visual storytelling skills too, right? We've seen lots of great content out there, and it's not only from our fans, but our own staff too! Did you know that in addition to our own resident photographer Cambria, Brian from the Tasting Room and Colin from our packaging team also dabble in some stellar photography? We've pooled together our favorite tips and tricks for making the most of your photography, whether it's shot with your phone for social media or with a "real" camera.

On to number 1 ...

Sensory School: Time to Taste

On your path to sensory enlightenment you've learned how much aroma matters in the perception of flavor, but the other half of the experience comes from taste (the remainder of sensory that starts in your mouth).

The human tongue can detect five different tastes, and the rest of the flavor experience comes from your nose. Once beer enters your mouth, you'll perceive the tastes of sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and umami on your tongue. When tasting a beer, it's important to let it really cover all parts of your tongue, because as you'll see in the following (and kind of gross) diagram, those taste buds are all over the place ... as are gustatory hairs. Eeeeew.

A New Year's Duo of CA-Inspired Craft Beer Cocktails

Whether you're enjoying a warm holiday season in SoCal or a cooler one in NorCal, The Bruery has some CA craft beer cocktail recipes for you to enjoy. As a traveling bartender, our friend Brett has made cocktails & beertended in some of our nation's most scenic spots, but CA is the place he calls home. Have a Happy Brue Year wherever you are with these seasonal cocktail recipes.

These two drinks celebrate The Bruery’s seasonal beers and a new season for me as a transplant from Southern California to an area in San Francisco known for its Italian heritage: North Beach, filled with complex ecopoetics and beer cocktails.

The aim here is to combine both The Bruery’s complex flavors that come via aging with those of italian liqueurs, known for their complexity and recipes that are purportedly hundreds of years old.

Recipe: Aaron's Holiday Bruery Beer Cocktails

Our manager over at The Bruery Tasting Room has experience working at fancypants cocktail bars in San Diego, so when we were looking for some holiday recipes that incorporate beer, we had to include a couple bonus "recipes" that the cook might enjoy while preparing all those holiday plates. Aaron put together some new beer cocktails using each a limited release Bruery beer, a seasonal, and a brand new brew that we have not released just yet. It's tough work, but someone has to do it!

The first cocktail is a classic that has been around The Bruery since it's inception -- you will even see it in our Tasting Room from time to time: the Hottenroth Mimosa.

Harvesting a Brew: Barley Basics, from Brewer Andrew Bell

As we jump into Harvest Month at The Bruery and The Tasting Room, our staff is dissecting what it takes to harvest all the parts that make up beer. With the number of craft breweries skyrocketing, it's a wonder barley and hop suppliers can keep up

It's easy to take the supply & demand of beer ingredients for granted when we're simply focusing on the enjoyment of a fresh brew, so let's get to know our beer better in our series of posts on Harvesting a Brew. This first one comes from Bruery brewer Andrew Bell, homebrewer-extraordinaire-gone-pro.

Barley is by and large the biggest harvest-able component of beer. Hops get all the glory, and beer people sometimes grow hops at home, but very rarely have you heard of people growing barley at home. In fact, very few breweries grow barley in the US -- two of the few that I can think of off the top of my head are Sierra Nevada and Rogue, and only for a small range of beers.

This is probably due to the fact that raw barley is not particularly useful for beer making. To make it useful in most circumstances, it has to be malted. The malting process is both an art and a science, and is relatively complicated and resource-heavy to do at home, or at an actual brewery, in any large quantity.

It's Barrel Aged Beer Day! Happy #BABeerDay to the World!

It's the most wonderful day of the year: the first ever Barrel Aged Beer Day to celebrate all the delicious beers that spawn from the beauty of barrel aging.

As a small craft brewery with a penchant for wood, we have quite a few barrels under our warehouse roofs so that we can make the beer we love. Whether it's one of our big spirit aged ales, a sour brew, or a beer & wine hybrid, The Bruery team is passionate about coming up with beers that defy the norms and styles of beers out there, and barrels open up endless possibilities to grow our beer program.

Given that nearly every possible thing has a holiday made up for it (relax, there is an Elephant Appreciation Day and World Beard Day), we felt a day celebrating barrels and their bugs was well overdue. And so it begins, the first Friday of every October we encourage you to raise a glass (or tulip, or snifter) to Barrel Aged Beers and toast one another across the universe.

It's already been October 4th for a while in Australia. Here's an ongoing list of where we're hearing online toasts for #BABeerDay -- where are you?

Bonding with our Blogger Buddies at BBC13

Last weekend our Social Media & Marketing Manager Cambria Griffith attended our first Beer Bloggers Conference. This conference began a couple years ago to help beer bloggers have an opportunity to engage with beer industry professionals, meet fellow bloggers, tour new breweries, and learn how to sharpen their blog-game through different panels, talks, and tastings.

For 2013 attendees descended upon Boston, MA with a pre-conference excursion in Portland, ME. Cambria has been with The Bruery since April, but has been blogging about beer since 2009. Having worked in the beer industry since 2011, her background is filled with many learning opportunities she shared with fellow bloggers on the Industry Bloggers Panel. Here's her extremely long but loving recap on BBC13.

I may be writing this from the sky while flying back from the 2013 Beer Bloggers Conference, and though I haven't really slept yet, I am making myself be the awesome industry blogger that you deserve by cracking this laptop open to share what I took away from our time with friends and fans who came out to the 2013 Beer Bloggers Conference.

It seems the Twitter insanity around #BBC13 has yet to be silenced.

Our Wood Cellarman's take on Sour Ales

-by Matt Strickland, The Bruery's Wood Cellarman

I wrote this piece about 8 months ago for another website I was writing for at the time (www.grogsociety.com). Since we have a Sour Beer class coming up at The Bruery Provisions on August 13^th (Stop by or email Provisions for more details) I thought this would be a good time to resurrect it for The Bruery blog. Of course you could also be cynical about the damn thing and call me lazy for rehashing stuff. You would also be right…and not my favorite person.

The Power of Sour: The Emergence of Modern Sour Beers

When I was 11 or 12 I considered myself a candy connoisseur. My appetite for those treats in the grocery-checkout lane was rarely sated. Always on the hunt for the next great sugar high, I found in my hand one day a bag of Warheads. (For the uninitiated, Warheads were superlatively sour bite-sized pieces of tooth torture.) I popped the first one into my mouth. My lips puckered and my tongue began to drown in cleansing saliva. I was hooked. From that day forward, I sought only the sourest of sour candies: lemon drops, candy straws, and gumballs that seemed to resemble miniature Death-Stars made solely of citric acid. I couldn’t get enough of that teeth-rotting goodness, but it was never sour enough. My friends and I searched relentlessly for something that would take tartness to the next level. We wanted pleasure and pain, the pre-adolescent equivalent to the type of jack-assery that ensues when you combine a nose, a straw, and wasabi.

My wife may dispute this point, but I am an adult now. My candy intake is strictly monitored. The sour candy indiscretions of my youth are long behind me. “Sellout!”, you say? No, I’ve just found new ways to get my fix. Sour candy youth transplants often veer towards the hot-sauce craze when they grow older, and I can certainly count myself amongst the capsaicin acolytes, but the object of my youthful obsession has been reincarnated in Belgian-style sour beers. Belgian lambics, Flanders reds and browns, and now a number of American breweries have thrown their barrels into that ring. It’s a great time to be a sour beer lover.

That First Taste

I encountered my first true sour ale about 7 years ago on trip to Chicago. I was a few years into my switch from big-brew swiller to microbrew maven when I came across a bottle of Lindeman’s Gueuze Cuvée René. I had heard of said beer through various outlets, and most of the reviews had been complimentary though a bit esoteric. The common aroma descriptors at the time were “barnyard”, “horse blanket”, and “sweat”, usually followed by acclaim and elitist caveats to the effect of “Not for the faint of heart.” Well, brew-love bravado brought out my wallet and I purchased the bottle for consumption later that night. I popped the cork with an air of sophistication and poured glasses for my two friends. We smelled. We sipped. They spit. I choked it down fast enough to feign an appreciative grin. It was one of those moments when I thought, “I should like this, but I don’t.” Further research led me to the conclusion that, like brussels sprouts, sour beer was an acquired taste. This concerned me. Despite my parents’ best intentions and dinner table ruses, I still can’t stand sprouts of any kind. All the same, I was determined to understand what the sour ale hubbub was about.

Fast-forward a few years. I was in Belgium on vacation with some friends, spending a few days in Antwerp. My knowledge of all things beery had led us to a hidden gem of a pub called The Kulminator. We sat down in the back patio encircled by crumbling stone walls and about a dozen stray cats. Our server was an affable old Flemish woman who spoke very little English. She quietly brought out the beer menu, a compendium of more than 500 beers, mostly Belgian and nearly half vintage-dated. Like any good beer geek, I had done my homework. I promptly went for Boon’s Framboise, a 3-year-old bottle of Belgian lambic sour beer aged with raspberries. Some minutes later, my anticipation was rewarded with a dusty bottle laid down in a small wicker basket. Our server poured us all a glass. I felt a thrill of trepidation. “Here we go again,” I thought. “Once more into the breach.” And there it was: the sight, the smell, and then the taste. Euphoria in my mouth and eureka in my mind, that bottle of lambic became a revelation. The aroma was laden with earthy notes, lactic sourness, and red fruit tones. The taste was light and lactic with a spritzy carbonation that cleansed a palate clamoring for more. I had found a new obsession.

Make no mistake—these beers are complex. Indeed, if you’ve been searching for a beer to put your faculties of smell and taste through a sensory decathlon, look no further. Depending on the sub-style you imbibe, you may encounter smells of raisins, dark fruit, apples, hay, horse blanket, honey, cherries, plums, raspberries, vanilla, cedar and more, all encased in a firm lactic sourness that can be subdued or brazen. Put the glass to your lips and tip it back. Those aromas become flavors coupled with perhaps a little caramel, toffee, maltiness, or citrus. Hopheads should check the lupulin madness at the door. With few exceptions, hop aroma and bitterness are virtually nonexistent in these beers. The acidity gives the balance that the hops would otherwise provide. These tend to be very refreshing beers, though some modern interpretations are a bit heavier. Most commercial examples are of moderate strength, and rarely will you see a sour ale go beyond 8% abv, though I’ve seen a number of newer beers in stronger territory.

Bugs in my beer…

Even if you’ve never tried sour ales, you’ve probably seen them. These curiosities on the shop shelves and bottle bars, their labels bearing strange names and unfamiliar words, are often passed over due to their seemingly odd nature and the high price tag so many of them command. Why are sour ales so bizarre, and why should you be willing to fork over your hard-earned scratch for them? It’s all in how they’re made.

When food goes sour, we usually consider it spoiled. The sour sensation we experience is caused by the presence of acids in the food. There are numerous common food acids, and they produce varying levels of perceived sourness on the palate. In fruits like apples and oranges (See? You can compare them), these acids are naturally present. In beer however, (putting aside the use of CO₂ which forms carbonic acid and carbonation) the source of the sensorially important acids is often microbial. Beer yeast will produce varying amounts of lactic acid, but most strains that brewers use have been bred to keep these flavors in check.

Modern sour beer production takes a different approach. The brewers want those acids, and they use a number of microbes to get them. The three big “bugs,” as they are often called, that tend to get used in addition to standard brewer’s yeasts are Brettanomyces (a yeast), Lactobacillus, and Pediococcus (both are bacteria). American sour beer producers will often choose one or a combination of these critters to get the correct profile, while more “traditional” producers in Belgium often utilize all of them and a whole lot more. (Some producers will forgo the addition of microbes in favor of simply adding straight lactic acid, though in my opinion this yields inferior results.)

Most of these beers start out as normal, easy drinking brews. Mix some grains with water and lightly hop it. Brewer’s yeast gets pitched, and within a week or two you’ve got yourself a beer. It is during the steps taken after alcoholic fermentation when these beers are transformed. Methods vary from region to region and brewer to brewer, but they all include letting an “infection” take hold in the beer.

Lactic acid bacteria such as Lactobacillus and Pediococcus move into the beer either through addition by the brewer or because they’ve been hanging out in the brewery all along. Either way, they set up shop and multiply. These guys produce the bulk of lactic acid found in sour ales. But if lactic acid was the only thing these bacteria could produce then these beers probably wouldn’t have too much to offer outside of making your mouth pucker a bit. For instance, strains of lactobacillus can produce certain compounds called tetrahydropyridines that are reminiscent of popcorn or white bread, and in extreme cases yield what is called “mousy taint”. Pediococcus can also produce a number of aroma compounds, though many of these haven’t been researched heavily in beer.

Of all the microbes found in beer and wine, Brettanomyces is certainly the most controversial. Feared by brewers and winemakers all over the world, it has found a circle of friends in those who love sour beers. The reasons for Brett’s notoriety lie in its behavior. You see, Brett is a survivor—you might even call it the Green Beret of the brewing yeast world. It can survive for long periods on very little food, even subsisting on wood sugars from barrels if nourishment gets tight. And as soon as Brett walks into your brewery, he kicks his feet up on the coffee table, and turns on that 24 hour “I Love Lucy” marathon you secretly want to watch. In other words, you’re not likely to get him to leave very easily. Once Brett gets around beer, like so many of us, he becomes an animal, grabbing all he can. Even though the brewer’s yeast should have eaten most of the beer sugars already, Brett is more than happy to hang around and pick up the scraps and can even ferment the sugars that brewer’s yeast can’t, such as dextrins (this is partly why sour ales are often so dry). On top of consuming sugar, Brettanomyces is famous for getting nourishment from a dozen other sources, usually forming some pretty interesting aroma compounds in the process. Ever hear someone describe an aroma of bandaids in beer? That’s Brett. Ever had a beer that had a subtle smoky flavor and yet no smoked malt was used? It could be Brett. Goat, barnyard, antiseptic, and rubber can also come from this yeast. On paper, none of this probably sounds particularly appealing, but in a glass the story is a whole lot better. These aromas are usually produced in fairly small amounts and can blend together into a medley that is exciting and otherworldly.

There are a couple of drawbacks to adding all of this microflora to the beer. One is that the flavors these microbes produce often take a lot of time to develop. It is not uncommon to hear of these beers sitting in barrels for months or even years before they ever see a bottle. Another issue brewers must contend with is that the flavors can sometimes run amuck, resulting in beers that are less than balanced and sometimes completely ruined. For instance, lactic acid bacteria can produce a fair amount of diacetyl (smells a lot like movie theatre buttered popcorn) when the beer is young, though this is considered a fault in most styles and time is needed for the compound to be metabolized into less aromatic compounds like acetoin or 2,3-butanediol before the beer should be served. If the wrong strain of Brett is used or if conditions allow it to get out of control, the beer could wind up smelling like the bandage aisle of the drug store. As Peter Bouckaert of New Belgium Brewing was quoted as saying, “If you want to be good, you’re going to have to dump some beer.”

So go buy a bottle already…

Selling people on sour beers can be a tricky endeavor. These beers usually do not resemble what most people consider “true” beer. Their flavors are pronounced and the price of admission can be steep at times. (Some bottles fetch prices of $30+, but most examples can be had for $20 or less.) But for those with an adventurous spirit, they can be revelatory beverages worthy of your time and money. And as with most great adventures, these brews are best shared with friends and food. Pour yourself a glass and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

The following is a list of recommended brews with general tasting notes. Due to the nature of these beers, production is often small and you may not be able to find some of them in your area. Ask around. The world of sour ales is getting bigger all the time, and as much as I’d like to, there’s just not enough room here to list all the great ones. Cheers.

Sans Pagiae (The Bruery; 5.8% abv)

We make quite a number of sour ales here at The Bruery, however this one is currently one of my favorites. This is our version of a Belgian-style Kriek. It’s perfectly funky with a pleasing sourness and expressive cherry flavors. Find a bottle fast before they’re all gone.

Temptation (Russian River Brewing; 7.25% abv)

Vinnie Cilurzo has been at the forefront of the American wild ale scene for several years now with his line of barrel aged beauties. Temptation is a Belgian style blonde aged for 12 months in Chardonnay barrels with Brettanomyces. This beer showcases a lovely tartness with plenty of oak and fruit to back it up.

Kriek (Brouwerij Cantillon; 5% abv)

Cantillon is one of the most prominent producers of traditional lambic beers coming out of Belgium. Hunt down anything with their name on the bottle, but this one in particular is a real treasure. Earthy, musty, and sour wrap around subtle cherry and red fruit flavors. This is the real deal.

Rodenbach Grand Cru (Brouwerij Rodenbach; 6%abv)

Sour ale lovers would hunt me down and drown me in a vat of Bud Lite if I didn’t mention this beer. This is a great example of the Flanders Red style from Belgium. Aged for nearly 2 years in oak tuns, this is a beer designed for quiet contemplation. Tart cherry and vanilla give way to a background of malty sweetness. Truly classic.

La Folie (New Belgium Brewing; 6% abv)

New Belgium Brewing was lucky enough to steal Peter Bouckaert away from Rodenbach several years ago and it’s a good thing too. Bouckaert is a God in the sour beer world of Odin like proportions, but this beer feels more of a Loki-like effort for all its mischievousness. Sour apple, oak, dark fruits and a hint of Brett: What’s not to love?

Kriek Ale (Cascade Brewing; 7.3% abv)

For my money, these guys are some of the most creative producers of American sour beers. The logo on their T-shirts even reads “House of Sour” so you know what you’re in for here. Their Kriek spends over 6 months in oak with their own special strain of Lactobacillus. This is an intensely sour beer with gorgeous cherry aromas and a hint of cherry pie crust in the mouth.

Matt Strickland - The Wood Cellarman

I am the Wood Cellarman for The Bruery. What is a “Wood Cellarman”, you ask? Well, going beyond the fifth-grade level innuendo that is giggling through your brain right about now, it means that I take care of The Bruery’s barrel program. Essentially I cellar a lot of wood…There ya go; you can get it all out of your damn system…

OK.

If you’re reading this blog right now it probably means that you’re a fan of The Bruery or that you have some insatiable and disturbing fetish that I promise you, even on my best day I couldn’t satisfy…so move along. However, if you fall into the first camp then you probably already have an idea of what it is I do.

The Bruery currently boasts one of the largest (I believe we’re in second place right now behind Goose Island) barreled beer programs in the country. When I interviewed for this job back in February we were sitting at 1300 barrels filled with another 200-300 waiting to be filled. When I started this gig a month ago we were at 1700 filled with another 300 on the fill list. And in 3 weeks or so we’ll have a total of 2500 barrels in the warehouse with another 500 on the way by the end of the year.

It reminds me of a joke that Jerry Seinfeld once told about painting his apartment every year and the room felt just a little bit smaller as a result. (Except in my case the “paint” is barrels and I don’t have a TV show that will inexplicably turn all my friends’ careers into road kill.) Every day I walk into that enormous warehouse and it feels just a little bit smaller.

In addition to maintaining one of the largest barrel programs in the U.S., I believe we also have one of the most complex programs as well. Between our Bourbon Barrel program and our sour beer program we have nearly 20 different beers sitting in barrel. Within each beer there are often multiple batch types, differing production methods, and barrel selections. Some barrels we age for years and won’t make it into this year’s blends while other barrels will. It’s as much a science as it is a craft - Take that Stephen Hawking!

When I tell people about my job, two questions usually come up: 1. Why would you want to be a Wood Cellarman? And, 2. How did you get the job?

The answer to the second question is that I interviewed with Patrick and Tyler months ago and I imagine most likely they went out that night, drank a bit too much Black Tuesday and one of them dared the other to hire me.

The answer to the first question is a bit more involved.

Barrels have a long history in beer and wine. Millennia have passed with very few changes or advances in the art of coopering. Barrels are still largely put together by hand with rudimentary tools, by skilled craftsmen and artists whose very existence should be celebrated in the form of a national holiday. (Even Beauty Queens get an entire week in August and not a single one of them has come through on their promises for bikini-clad world peace.)

Wood has an amazing impact on beer. It can impart a wide array of flavors and aromas. It can alter the beer’s texture. It can act as a home for microbes looking to get messed up on some beer sugars. Or it can simply act as a container for the beer to slowly mature in. No other material can have the same effects on beer and this is why beer has been sloshing around in barrels for centuries now. It is very much a part of the storied craft beer tradition and I’m very fortunate to play a part in it.

My day to day is rarely routine. Some days I’m racking the contents of puncheon barrels into smaller sized wine barrels, or maybe adding some cocoa nibs and vanilla bean to some bourbon barrels. Other days have me receiving barrel shipments, taking samples, or performing mini-blends. My mop has also become a close friend.

As a fan of The Bruery you may have noticed that we are in the middle of a substantial expansion process right now. As I mentioned above, our barreled beer program is roughly doubling in size this year and it’s not like it was the runt of the litter to begin with. Nearly half our production goes through my warehouse at some point and in the coming months I plan on sharing more about what we do here and about barrels in general. So keep pouring glasses of Oude Tart, Sour in the Rye, Anniversary, and Black Tuesday, because I promise you, we’ve got more on the way. Until then, I swear to keep a watchful eye on them for ya.

Four Years... Goes By Quick!

I apologize to all of you in blogland.  First off, I apologize for not contributing to the blog.  I've avoided writing here for a very long time, and while I'd like to commit to more blog posts, I feel that doing so won't actually help in me posting more frequently.  Secondly, I apologize for not being more timely with this post!  I was supposed to write about our four years of being in business during our anniversary month, but with the ten anniversary events our 31 days of May archive promotion, new fermenters, Tasting Room and related construction, and all of the other changes going on at The Bruery, I couldn't find the time!

My life four years ago versus now is completely different.  On June 13th, 2008, Tyler was The Bruery's only employee.  The two of us did everything.  Brewing, bottling, labeling, cleaning, bookkeeping, sales, compliance, the list goes on.  Actually, we did have some great volunteers who helped bottle.  Some of their wives still haven't forgiven them for the 12+ hour days of bottling (and as a result, coming home smelling like a brewery).  One of the early volunteers, Ben Weiss, became a legitimate part time employee on June 23rd.  In all of 2008, we brewed the equivalent of what we now brew in less than a week.  While each task was fairly minimal given our size at the time, it was a ton of work because it was the first time I was doing any of these tasks, other than cleaning toilets!

We sold our beer in Southern California exclusively with about six accounts, and on June 9th, we sent our first shipment to Stone Brewing Co.  It consisted of 12 kegs of Black Orchard, 55 cases of Batch No. 1, 55 cases of Saison Rue, 55 cases of Orchard White, 12 kegs of Orchard White, 5 cases of glassware, and 18 tap handles (which we made ourselves).  

Pallets of Batch No. 1 - Levud's in the brewery.

This first order was the biggest order we'd ship to them until November of 2008.  I had no idea what to expect as far as sales volume in the first year, and I was very afraid about brewing too much and having a bunch of beer I couldn't sell.  Plus, I was running out of cash and literally couldn't afford to purchase kegs or more bottles until we sold what we already packaged.  It was part of the plan to put beer into bourbon and wine barrels to kick off our barrel aging program, and this made up a significant amount of production in the first year.  I believe we filled around 50 barrels between June and December of 2008.  We had four fermenters, and at this point we likely only had Trade Winds Tripel in the fermenter.  Three fermenters were empty, something today that would drive me nuts!  This batch of Trade Winds only used thai basil from my backyard.  This basil bush went from amazingly full with flowers and leaves to being a bundle of sticks after this first 30 BBL batch.  We bottled that batch on June 23rd, and weren't able to sell it until mid-August.  Nowadays we start selling Trade Winds in April.  When October came around and we started selling Autumn Maple, we still had quite a bit of Trade Winds in inventory that we had to sell by the case from the tasting room at a steep discount.  By the end of the year, my wife Rachel came on board to manage the books and Jonas came on board to help in the tasting room.  The first year for The Bruery was very difficult.  My Dad (my business partner and The Bruery president) and I met every few weeks, and I'd bring the current financial reports and we'd compare them to projections.  Those were disappointing times to say the least.  There is nothing worse than trying to raise more money than when you're in the process of losing it.  We lost a ton of cash, it was a lot of work, but somehow I have mostly fond moments of that time.  The beer must have kept me happy!

Comparing our first year to our fourth year is tough-- we might as well be talking about two different breweries.  We now have 45 employees, and will likely hit over 50 employees within the next few months.  We are distributed in 20 states (plus DC), a few countries, and we're able to sell everything we produce.  What a great situation to be in, right?!  On an ongoing basis, 40% of our production goes into oak barrels, where on average it will age for 14 months.  Our barrel aged beers include everything from rich stouts to sour ales and other experimentations.

The new Tasting Room in progress.

We are also building a new cellar with 130% more stainless fermentation capacity than we currently have, a new tasting room, a pilot brewhouse, more warehousing space, and a dedicated QC lab!  Thankfully, The Bruery isn't losing money anymore. However, we are spending everything we have to build this new part of our brewery, and invest in our barrel aged beers where we won't see a return for some time.  My tasks have gone from doing everything at the brewery to just doing what I want to work on, or at least that's the goal.  It's a spectacular thing, but to be honest, I'm still stressed!  It's just part of my personality that probably won't go away, no matter how good things are going.

I look forward to the next four years, and wonder how I'll perceive myself and The Bruery of 2012 in 2016.  Will I consider The Bruery of 2012 to be as small as I now consider The Bruery of 2008?  Or will I have overestimated our demand, and find myself selling cases in the tasting room at a steep discount?  I'm also curious where the craft brewing industry will be in 2016-- will we reach 10%+ marketshare, or will there be less breweries than today?  All I know is it'll be an interesting ride.

Thank you to all of our supporters, including our fans, loyal accounts, distributors, suppliers, writers, current and past employees, for making The Bruery's success possible!  This isn't just The Bruery's anniversary, it's all of our anniversary.  I look forward to the continued opportunity to celebrate life and great beer with you.

Cheers,

Patrick

The Bruery