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.

August = Spiced Beer Month at the Tasting Room

A new month means a new theme at The Bruery Tasting Room. It's summery all year in CA, but Fall is fast approaching already which means the release of Autumn Maple and more beers full of palate pleasing spices you might find in your favorite foods!


Some special beers you can look forward to this month include our highly sought after, fast to kick, spicealicious horchata-inspired beer, aptly named Or Xata! We'll be releasing this on draft, as well as White Chocolate, our wheatwine made with cocoa nibs & vanilla; Batch 1000 BRYEIAN, made with a winning recipe from Colorado-based homebrewers Brian Pramov and Bryan Keas; plus several fun randalls and pins sprinkled throughout the month as outlined below. Please note that these dates are subject to change as needed. We are a small craft brewery and sometimes our production schedule has to change unexpectedly!

August 1:  Mmm, you can almost smell that lovely yam through the screen.

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!