Sour Barrel Aged Beer 101 -- Packaging

It's time for our last blogpost about sour barrel aged beer. Whether it's brewing, cellaring or packaging these beers, each step of the process takes extreme diligence and care to make sure our sour (an non sour) beers stay happy. Such is the life of employees that work at a place that makes crazy delicious barrel aged sours and non sours under the same roof!

Packaging these unique beers not only requires duplicate equipment, which takes up space, funds, and requires even more cleaning; it also takes extreme attention to detail and utmost care, as this is the last stop before the beer heads out on its way to you (and if we're putting a beer in your hands, we want to be proud of it.)

Not only is the chance of cross contamination risky business, barrel aging introduces a plethora of other things that can potentially lead to unpredictable (and even unwanted) outcomes. If one barrel has an unwanted bug that goes undetected,  it might do nothing, or it might ruin a whole batch over time. Alas, these are the challenges we put up with to make the beer that excites us. YOLO?

Great Lakes of Bruery Beer are Coming

In just one week, we'll be launching The Bruery in the state of Michigan!!

Jonas and Cambria will be in Detroit next week to kick off our most recent addition to our list of US states where our beer is distributed, and we want you Michiganders (or Michiganians) to be a part of this launch. We're having an Instagram contest with $100 of Bruery swag for the winning photo. Here's how to enter the contest.

Meet the Homebruer: Benjamin Weiss

Our third employee ever, Benjamin has worked in just about every role at The Bruery. From brewing, to packaging, to marketing, to arts & crafts, he's worked his way finally to Director of Marketing here. But he wasn't always working such a dreamy job. Ben came from the music industry and followed his passion for homebrew, which lead him to this very blog, before becoming a Bruer.

On a foggy Venice Beach day in late 2006, young Ben decided it was the perfect day to crack open his roommate's homebrew kit and boil some wort. Roughly a year later, he got to know a certain Patrick and Tyler.

What happened that made you start homebrewing? 

Meet the Homebruer: Cesar Alfaro

On the cusp of releasing Batch 1000 BRYEIAN, we are profiling some of our homebruers on our staff! Many of our team members developed their love for The Bruery via homebrew clubs, and today those clubs and their members are still very important to us. That's a big reason why we host our Batch series competition for milestone brews.

One of our homebruers made his first batch in 2008, and today he works in our packaging department, carefully bottling and lovingly boxing bottles of beer to be sent out for your enjoyment. His name is Cesar, and he has excellent hair.

What sparked your interest in homebrewing?

Sour Barrel Aged Beer 101 -- Cellaring & Aging

We've recently been dissecting the laborious process of making sour barrel aged beers and the process of keeping them happy. Now that we've looked at the brewing and lab work required for these beers, it's time to address cellaring and barrel aging.

After these beers are brewed, they are racked into barrels that fall under the scrupulous watch of our wood cellarmen. These barrels are stored mainly in two off-site warehouses and taken back and forth to the brewery building as needed for filling, emptying, and hugging. Our team spends many hours babysitting these barrels to make sure they (and their precious cargo) are content.

When we brew batches of sour beer for aging, we won't see them again for many months, or even years. On top of that, a percentage of beer evaporates from these barrels each year, so we actually end up with less beer than when we started. This means we're making beer that is not being sold immediately, some of which is very moody, expensive and vanishing into the air!

It takes building relationships with wineries and coopers to get these barrels, not to mention some funds to afford storage space for them. And since we love to get crazy with ingredients at times, getting large quantities of fruit (including weird ones) to add to these beers can certainly tally up some costs.

But we believe this is all worth it to make the beer we love. Lots of you had questions about our sour barrel aged beer, so we addressed the cellaring & aging side of things in this post.

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: