Recipe: Bräuista's Beer Cheese Fondue Macaroni & Cheese

The first winning recipe from our Holiday Cooking with Beer Recipe contest comes from Cher Lemos of Bräuista.com. Her Beer Cheese Fondue Mac & Cheese certainly works well as a filling meal, but for the sake of our waistlines we'll start this week off using her rich recipe as our contest-winning appetizer.

Nothing says comfort food to me quite like homemade macaroni and cheese. It's warm, gooey and cozy. But can I leave it at that? No can do. I had to add beer.

Harvest Beer & Cheese Pairing Favorites from our Resident Cheesemonger

Today's Harvest Month beer & food pairing comes from one of our humble barrel fellows who spends his day making sure the thousands of barrels in our warehouses stay happy and organized. Before Cesar started focusing much of his time on Bruery beer, he did a lot of homebrewing and worked at a local cheese shop.

Here around The Bruery some call me The Barrel Whisperer, but did you know when first starting at The Bruery I was also working as a cheesemonger? Let’s say I just did I did it for some extra ... cheddar.

Anyways, while working the cheese shop I learned a great deal about different varieties of cheese and how I can incorporate my love of beer to every type.

Holiday Beer & Food Pairings for the Season from our Certified Cicerone™

Our very own Director of Marketing has some thoughts to share on pairing seasonal beers with seasonal foods. For today's pairing suggestions, Ben give us his best Certified Cicerone™ thoughts on what to pair with Saisons, pumpkin beers, and holiday ales which fit this time of year all too well.

Thanksgiving is right around the corner. The weather has changed and parts of the country are about to see their first snowfall. It’s time to fatten up for the winter. May as well do it in style. Right?

This is a great time of year for both food and beer. It’s not too hot to enjoy something hearty or spicy and it isn’t too cold that a frosty beer seems out of the question. There are great new vegetables popping their heads up at the farmers market and all of those malty holiday ales are starting to hit the shelves at the local bodega. So, where do we begin? As with any classic tasting, let’s go light to dark.

Harvesting a Brew: Hop School with Tyler King

The words "harvest beer" may trigger thoughts of fresh or wet hopped beers. They are indeed delicious, and though we don't make a lot of beers that taste hugely hoppy, we use hops regularly in both our sours and barrel aged beers for balance and flavor. For our third post on what it takes to harvest a beer, our Senior Director of Brewing Operations Tyler King shares his experience in visiting the Pacific Northwest during hop harvest.

During my transition from BJ’s to The Bruery I was lucky enough to visit the beautiful Yakima Valley for the 2007 hop harvest. I guess I never thought of where hops came from before my trip. With my love of wine and the countryside, I always envisioned lush green mountainsides with 20 foot tall hop towers as far as the eye could see.

Harvesting a Brew: Jessica Davis explains Working with Brewer's Yeast

So far we've explored what it takes to harvest barley for brewing, but what does it take to get those amazing little living beings we call yeast to convert that barley-sugar-water into beer? Our Lady of The Bruery Lab Jessica Davis can explain and expand your microbiology vocabulary.

You can’t get very far in a brewery without yeast. One way to keep a yeast culture going is to harvest it. Harvesting yeast implies that the cell culture has already been used to make beer. The basic principle is that you are collecting it to use again, then again and probably 10 more times.

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.

Black Tuesday - The technical side of things

Our goal at The Bruery is to create exciting beer and along with that, to share that beer with as many people as we can. It sucks when the plan to share the beer becomes an issue, as it did earlier this week with our Black Tuesday 2013 online sale.

Though our online store website initially failed us, it did eventually start working, and thanks to our amazing and patient fans we were then able to get Black Tuesday into the hands of more people than ever before. We know how frustrating this was, and we are very sorry. We appreciate the flood of comments offering advice and support, so we felt it appropriate to give you guys an outline of what happened.

10 Bruers, 5 Days, 642 Breweries -- How we Handled Ourselves at The Great American Beer Festival

With a very full schedule and crew of 10 in tow, we had quite the trip to Colorado this year for the Great American Beer Festival!

We kicked off Day 1 without with Mr. Patrick Rue, as he had already made his trek to CO so he could judge beers. Without his majestic presence, we tearfully loaded into a limobus to visit our friends at New Belgium and Odell Brewing Company in Fort Collins.

Getting our Feet Wet. In Hops?

We love our little pilot brew system. In case we aren't doing anything crazy on our regular system (which in itself is a crazy notion) we have a strapping little 3 bbl babe system beckoning us to fill it with our weirdest, most experimental, beer dreams, fantasies, and small collabs.

For almost any brewery in So Cal, (wait, let's just go with ALL of CA) brewing with a boatload of hops is increasingly common. And that's one of the things we love about our sunshine state -- we have some of the world's best hoppy beers made right in our own backyard. All. The. Time.

That's all the more reason we made the promise years ago to leave this beautiful beer style to the numerous breweries near and far that are doing a tremendous job making world-class IPAs. And all the more reason it's really bizarre that we've been working on not one, but five hoppy beers for you to try in our Tasting Room.

Tyler has been really excited about this new project, which will ultimately let you enjoy five, single-hop, fresh hopped American pale ales side-by-side (by-side-by-side-by-side). Here's his explanation of what's going on, straight from the Sr. Director of Brewing Operations himself:

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?