Sour Barrel Aged Beer 101 - Brewing & Yeasts

Last week we outlined why sour beers are such a pain in the butt to make in Sour Barrel Aged Beer 101- Challenge Accepted! This week, thanks to the power of the interwebz we can answer some of your questions you posted on our Facebook & Twitter. If you have a sour bottle handy, now's probably a good time to pop it open!

Here are some of the common questions related to brewing sour barrel aged beers, answered by Tyler King, our Senior Director of Brewing Operations who we're pretty sure you know by now, and the lovely Jessica Davis, our brilliant Quality Specialist.



Jess has been on our team for several months now and we are thrilled to have on board with her years of experience in SCIENCE! She knows how to do all kinds of weird things in our fancy lab, and she has been handling the tremendous task of keeping our yeasts and beers happy & healthy. If you ever see her around the Tasting Room, give her a sanitary high-five!

A Little Confession to the Central Coast of CA

Last week a good chunk of our team headed up to California's beautiful central coast to support our new relationship with Central Coast Distributing in the area. Those of you living in San Luis Obispo, the northern parts of Santa Barbara, and sections of Monterey can look forward to starting to see more of our beer out your way.



In case you somehow missed it, we do have a love of wine culture here at The Bruery. It's pretty spectacular to see how different industries can cross-pollinate, and we love to get out to wine country to let our imagination loose and find inspiration for new ideas.

Sour Barrel Aged Beer 101 -- Challenge Accepted!

Do you remember a time before you knew about sour, barrel aged beer? You knew what beer was (an awesome beverage), you knew what sour tasted like (remember warheads?) and you knew other delicious beverages came out of barrels (hello wine).

While our fondness for this style is quite apparent in our portfolio, and your support of our experimentation has enabled us to continue to develop new twists on our sour line up, we often hear a demand for even more variety and availability of these tasty treats.

So in the spirit of sour barrel aged beer month, and to quell your awesome curiosity, we want to look closer at three parts of the process of making these beers and explore the risks, pampering special attention, and extra time it takes to make sure our sour barrel aged beers grow up to be happy, healthy 750 mL babes.



We'll look at each part of the process a little deeper, using some questions submitted by you via our Facebook & Twitter, in the following posts about:

Meet the Hombruer: Matt Olesh

Homebrewing is where Patrick and the OG Bruery crew first got their adorable little beer making sea-legs. The homebrew community is certainly still a priority to us, and so for our milestone batches we host a competition where the winning recipe comes from ... you guessed it: homebrewers! So far we've made Batch 1, 50, 300 and are now on to our 1000th batch featuring a recipe from Brian and Bryan (AKA Briyan) from Colorado. They'll be coming out to visit us in mid-July to help brew Batch 1000, a Cascadian dark rye.

Though we are a larger company now than when we started only five years ago, our passion for brewing (and goofing off) has only grown stronger. Whether we work in the office, tasting room, or brewery itself, lots of us homebrew when we're off the clock, even though we're around it all day!

We're highlighting our "homebruers" in a series of blogposts in support of our upcoming Batch 1000 beer. This time we're featuring a man who is no stranger to many of you who hang at The Bruery Tasting Room. Matt Olesh is our Director of Retail Operations and he's been a homebrewing for about 5 years now.

Pucker Up for July, Sour Barrel Aged Beer Month

July means there's a new dawn at The Bruery Tasting Room. Every month we are focusing on a particular beer genre with special events, tappings, archive keg releases, educational activities, new beer debuts, unique casks, randalls, flights and more.



The month of July brings us sour barrel aged beer insanity. We're bringing out lots of treats from our special collection all month long including Tart of Darkness, Rueuze, bottles from our Vitis series and many more favorites that you will hardly ever see out there!

We're thrilled to announce that Tart of Darkness will be going out for nationwide distribution starting this month, so keep an eye out for it at your favorite local spot that has Bruery beers. But even bigger than that is the return of Bottleworks XII!

Meet the Homebruer: Rich Ruelle

We're pretty excited about brewing our 1000th batch of beer this year. You can read more about the homebrew competition and winning recipe for Batch 1000 in our blogpost Homebrued from Batch 1 to 1000, and Beyond.

As the magical time to brew Batch 1000 approaches, we're profiling some of our very own hombrewers homebruers on our staff.

First up is one of our longtime employees turned brewers, Rich Ruelle. He's been with us since 2009 and held basically every role you can imagine at The Bruery (well, almost every role. Calm your imagination down). Now a homebrewer for a decade, Rich's recent concoctions include the damned delicious, summer-friendly Humulus Palm, which you may have had the pleasure of enjoying in our Tasting Room during May.



When did you start homebrewing?

A Look Back on June, Fruited Beer Month

Our very own Tasting Room now has official themed months! This means each month we'll be focusing on a particular beer genre with special events, tappings, archive keg releases, educational activities, new beer debuts, unique casks, randalls, flights and more.



Our first themed month focused on Fruited Beer for all of June. While we love our beers as they are, we came up with some great randalls that you guys helped us pick out. We brought out a good amount of archived beers and one-offs, like ISO:FT and ORB, and we had some great new beer releases for Society members. Read on for a review of what we were up to in June.

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.

Blank & Branded Growlers at The Bruery Tasting Room

There has been a lot of discussion (and certainly a good amount of confusion) about CA growler laws lately. Though the law has not actually changed recently, there has been much more attention on it. You can read the whollllllle PDF about enforcing these rules & regulations here, but we've been through the research and come up with a solution that we think is a MUCH more interesting read. We're ready to change our growler policy, and this blogpost explains how we will be doing that, based on frequently asked questions we've received so far.



We will fill 2-liter blank, Palla-style swing top growlers (the same style as the ones we currently fill), but that have no markings that can be associated with any other brewery. We’ll sell empty, blank growlers for $10, the same price as our own The Bruery™ branded growlers.

Mash, Grind, Blend, Taste, Repeat

We've made a coffee beer with Portola Coffee Lab before. Those of you in our Hoarders Society may recall our most recent beer using Porotla's beans: Mélange 8 is our blend of our bourbon barrel aged wheatwine (White Oak Sap), our bourbon barrel aged anniversary ale and Don Pachi Estate Geisha coffee beans, literally the most expensive beans in the world. This time, Jeff and Patrick came together to try some blends using a couple different kinds of roasts that don't have a $111 per pound price tag but we still think are downright delicious.



Finding the right level of coffee to blend with our beer pretty much replicated the process of making a cup or coffee or tea, except there was a 12.5% beverage involved.