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.

Bruery Terreux™ to open in Anaheim, California

It's with great excitement we share news on a big step in our growth here at The Bruery. We will launch a new brand & tasting room in 2015, specializing in farmhouse-style and sour ales, both traditional and modern.

We are pleased to announce the formation of Bruery Terreux, a new brand that will focus solely on farmhouse-style ales fermented with wild yeasts as well as oak-aged sour ales. Our original brand will rededicate its focus specifically on experimentation with non-wild ales, modern twists on classic styles and aging beer in bourbon and other spirit barrels.

Bruery Terreux, which translates to “Earthy Bruery”, first and foremost takes inspiration from the earth, presenting flavors in as natural of a way as possible, as nature intended. Wort will be brewed on our brand new GEA CRAFT-STAR brewhouse and then transported to Bruery Terreux's own facility a few miles down the road. All fermentation, barrel aging and packaging will take place at this second facility. A brand new Bruery Terreux tasting room will also be opened at this location in late 2015 where customers will have the chance to enjoy Bruery Terreux’s offerings in a unique setting.

Our current brands that are brewed with wild yeasts or bacteria such as Saison Rue, Oude Tart, or Hottenroth Berliner Weisse, will be transitioned to Bruery Terreux. The recipes will remain the same, but will be overseen by wild beer specialists and will be bottled under the new branding. Exciting new beers will also be added to Bruery Terreux’s lineup.

More details will follow over the coming months. As this project is subject to approval from the City of Anaheim and the California Department of Alcoholic Beverages, details are subject to change.

Please follow Bruery Terreux on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram for late breaking developments.

Expansion Update 5: The Bruery Provisie

As you probably guessed from all of our recent posts on expansion, we were saving the best for last and today we are excited to announce the plans for The Bruery Provisie™.

The Bruery Provisie is a "Beer Spa" and is set to open in early Fall of this year just two doors down from our current Tasting Room.  Initially it will only be open to our current Society members, but there are plans to open new Provisie memberships in 2015.

Our Beer Spa will be a one of a kind destination for beer lovers to relax, rejuvenate and detox while enjoying beer inspired products such as Hop Tea.  The Bruery Provisie will feature many of the standard spa amenities, but with a beer twist.  Hop oil massages, barley soaks, honey & hops foot baths and once our new brewhouse is in place, we're even reconfiguring our current mash tun to become the ultimate beer lovers' hot tub!

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.

Expansion Update 3: A Bigger, Better, More Efficient Brewhouse

We're exicted about 2014 for lots of reasons. We've been making big strides in improving beer quality, we're receiving a brand new Westfalia centrifuge separator soon, and we're adding a Krones Kosme bottling line to our operation during this year. But what may be the most exciting news is we've made a big investment in a brand new brewhouse.

This semi-automated GEA Huppmann Craft-Star™ brewhouse is the first of its kind. While the manufacturers typically make brewing systems for much larger projects, this littler guy is just the right size for our place. It has the technology and efficiency that's normally found at (and only affordable to) bigger breweries. We'll be retiring our 15 bbl system and replacing it with this 30 bbl, flexible capacity little engine that can, letting us brew batches ranging between 20-35 bbls.

You can see our exact brewhouse being flaunted at the Drinktec 2013 in Munich in the following video:

Expansion Update 2: Clarified, But Never Filtered Craft Beer

Last week we announced a brand new Kosme bottling line is coming our way this year. This week we're proud to announce we'll also be adding the world's best separator to our brewery in 2014!

The Bruery has always made living beer that is unfiltered and unpasteurized. The choice to do this has lead to some speed bumps along the way.  Up til now, we age completely finished beer cold for an extended period of time to help the flocculation process.  While having a small amount of yeast and bottle conditioning improve beer quality, excess yeast can cause stability issues, such as autolysis, and will result in unwanted haze.

Expansion Update 1: Hello New Kosme Bottling Line!

As some of you may have noticed, we announced (somewhat secretly) that The Bruery is expanding during 2014! Quality is a huge priority for us, and we are thrilled to be introducing some new (and pretty big) measures to make sure we are producing beer that excites us and and is exemplary of the highest quality.

An illustration of our brand new Kosme bottling line, which is on its way to us this year.

There are a couple phases of growth and equipment additions we're working on this year. One of the first items we're adding to our company is a brand new bottling line. Expected to arrive in July this year is a 16-head Kosme line from Krones, arguably the highest quality manufacturer of beer bottling lines in the world. The addition of this line to our production means we can look forward to several improvements once everything is up and running.

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.

Sensory School: All Hail Aroma

We're all familiar with what it's like to eat something when you have a stuffy nose -- you can't really get much flavor out of anything, and the joy is pretty much taken out of any meal. Likewise, when you're diving into a decadent meal at a fancypants restaurant and someone walks by doused in bad cologne, your appetizer suddenly seems to take on notes of locker room.

This is because the full flavor of what we consume is a combination of taste (what we sense in our mouth) and aroma (what we detect with our nose). If you've never tried eating with your nose plugged, take a minute, step away from the computer, pour yourself a flavorful craft beer, and try doing it.

To appreciate and understand the importance of aroma in your sensory experience of beer, we've placed four "homework" items throughout this post that will help you appreciate the ingredients, presentation, and descriptors for all things beer aroma.

Sensory School: The Eye of the Beer-holder

As much as we know looks aren't everything, when it comes to beer the first sensory experience you'll enjoy is the appearance of your pour. There are several visuals that come into play before you even let a beer approach your palate, and they can be surprisingly simple but powerful details.

Color, clarity, head character, the play of light, the shape of glassware, the cleanliness of a pour, the haze of yeast, the color of foam, the dance of those precious little baby carbonation bubbles that float through your beer -- these are just some of the elements that stimulate our senses before even touching a beer. There's a surprising amount of thought that has gone behind the appearance of each and every craft beer you've ever enjoyed, and taking a minute to slow down and understand those visual stimulants might improve your beer drinking enjoyment.

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.

Cleaning the Slate -- Beer Issues from 2013

Wow, it’s been a crazy year. Our barrel program has come to life, we’ve released approximately 45 different bottled releases this year, and we are starting to fill the large pair of shoes we have created for ourselves. Part of filling in those shoes is finding our weak spots and fixing them. This year we’ve had five releases that didn’t go as planned -- we want to tell you about them and what we’re doing to avoid this in the future.

Beers That Have Had Issues

As you may recall, earlier in the year we stopped shipments of Ebony & Oak and issued refunds. This beer began souring and building excess carbonation a few weeks after it was released. While bourbon barrels are usually quite stable due to once having bourbon in them, they aren’t immune from causing beer spoilage. However, usually that spoilage happens during the time in the barrel and we catch it before packaging.

Careful Cellaring, Part 3: The Threat of Light

Another factor that can be damaging to you beer cellar is light. Did you know a beer's flavor can change in minutes in direct sunlight? Even unnatural, fluorescent light can harm your beer. The reason this happens is because the hops in beer are very sensitive to UV light. To explain what happens to the chemistry of beer, we turn again to Jess from our lab. 

Ever wonder why "lite" beers in clear bottles taste better with a lime slice and are skunky without one? It's because of a little nasty compound called MBT or as the organic chemist might say 3-methylbut-2-ene-1-thiol.

The odor and flavor of this compound is often reminiscent of skunks but is commonly referred to as the smell and taste of a "lightstruck" beer. The chemistry that goes on to change your delicious hops to skunkiness is well known and shown in the following graph about "The Lightstruck Reaction" (Graham, 2006):

Careful Cellaring, Part 2: The Importance of Temperature

Cellaring beer properly means paying close attention to the many elements that can make your collection age for the worse. One of the most influential factors that can cause any good beer to go bad is temperature. To best understand how temperature effects beer we've once again turned to Jess, our Quality Specialist, to explain what happens to a living beer when it spends time at less than ideal temperatures.

Why do you keep your milk or yogurt in the fridge? For some of the same reasons you would want to keep a beer in the fridge: it helps keep the beer as fresh as possible.

Too Darn Cold

Cold storage is not to be confused with frozen storage. Besides possibly making a beer-bomb in your freezer, keeping beer at sub-zero temperatures is not preferable. There actually are a few instances where freezing temperatures are used in the brewery:

What's in our Bruers' Cellars? Part 5 with Cambria Griffith

We're taking a look at some of our staff's personal beer cellars as we continue our month of celebrating (or cellarbrating?) cellared & aged beer. Today we look into the cellar tucked away in several cabinets in a (hopefully) temperate Long Beach apartment of Cambria Griffith, our Social Media & Marketing Manager.

Ok, yes, I wrote that in third person. Though my cellar might not stack up to some of those wine caves out there, I love getting surprised each time I decide to go ahead and dig in there to open something special. Thanks to this series of blogs on Bruer Cellars, I've been inspired to do a little spring winter cleaning.

What's in our Bruers' Cellars? Part 4 with Andrew Bell

Our brewer and infamous beer collector & trader Andrew Bell had some very thorough points on cellaring. Here's what Andrew has been up to with his beer collection.

I'm going to hold onto ___________ the longest. Probably up to _________ years/months!
I usually don't intentionally plan on aging one of my beers for more than five or six years at the longest (with a few exceptions). As far as ones that might stick around for a while: I have a case of 2011 Tilquin that will probably last another 10 years (if I open one a year), as well as a case each of Pelican's Perfect Storm and Mother of All Storms from a few years ago.

From the remaining bottles that I have of Partridge, at least one of them will last the 12 years. I ended up stocking up on that beer when it was first released and common on shelves out here in SoCal. I wasn't working for The Bruery back then, but I loved the beer fresh and ended up buying a case and a half of it around Christmastime. I still have about half a case yet. I figured that it was pretty affordable, tasty, and with all the craziness that was starting to build around Stone Brewing Co.'s 02.02.02, I figured that Partridge would probably be a good investment.

My most exciting beer opening will be _________ because I plan on opening it at ___________.

What's in our Bruers' Cellars? Part 3 with Matt Olesh

For the month of December, we're taking a closer look at cellaring & aging beer. So far it sounds like we have some serious gueuze and lambic fans, and given our trip to Belgium earlier this year, it's no wonder the enthusiasm for these beers is spreading among us.

Matt Olesh may be someone you know from previous beer trades or our very own Tasting Room. Here's what he has in his ever-expanding cellar.

What's in our Bruers' Cellars? Part 2 with Matt Becker

For the month of December, we're taking a closer look at cellaring & aging beer. One of the beautiful things about being able to cellar beer is that you can learn as go continually shrink and expand your cellar.

You might know our brewer Matt Becker is you are a New Brew Thursday fan. Here's what Matt has to say about his beer cellaring experience so far.

Check out the rest of our Bruers' cellars:

• What's in our Bruers' Cellars? Part 1 with Benjamin Weiss
• What's in our Bruers' Cellars? Part 3 with Matt Olesh
• What's in our Bruers' Cellars? Part 4 with Andrew Bell
• What's in our Bruers' Cellars? Part 5 with Cambria Griffith

What's in our Bruers' Cellars? Part 1 with Benjamin Weiss

For the month of December, we're taking a closer look at cellaring & aging beer. Our staff not only works with beer everyday, we obviously like to drink it too, so some of us have amassed our own beer cellar in the process.  We're opening our cellar doors (or maybe it's just a cabinet or closet door) to share our ups & downs of cellaring.

Check out what Ben, our Director of Marketing, has to say about his cellar. We had him fill out this Mad Lib so he wouldn't get bored with another Q & A asking him about his beer knowledge.

Check out the rest of our Bruers' cellars:

• What's in our Bruers' Cellars? Part 2 with Matt Becker
• What's in our Bruers' Cellars? Part 3 with Matt Olesh
• What's in our Bruers' Cellars? Part 4 with Andrew Bell
• What's in our Bruers' Cellars? Part 5 with Cambria Griffith