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.