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Where we've been:
The biggest news for us was that we had the
chance to factory test our new brewing equipment.
We wound up purchasing a 20 barrel brewhouse
(that’s 620 gallons if you’re counting) and five
40 barrel fermenters. This is plenty of capacity
to start with; we expect to be brewing about once
or twice a week for the first year (see to the
right for the full story on our blog).
The equipment is pretty great. It’s built for
efficiency and flexibility and we are looking
forward to becoming personally acquainted with it
in the very near future.
Next big step for us is to ready the facility for
the equipment installation. We have begun work on
the building (floors and walls first, painting a
bit later) and we expect to have the building
pretty close to being ready by the time we write
next month’s newsletter. The question we get most
right now is: “so when are you going to open”?
It’s still just a little bit hazy right now; we
should be able to give you an (approximate)
timetable for opening by next month.
Finally, February was an unbelievable year for
beer festivals in Buffalo. We had three in one
month – what? Is there any doubt that Buffalo
loves its beer? We kicked it off at the Buffalo
Winter Festival at the Armory, which is a
beautiful place for … well just about anything,
but especially a festival full of delicious beer.
Mid-month we hit up Buffalo
on Tap at the Convention Center. We were
told there were 3,000 people there – what? It was
mobbed, and we were busy non-stop, and it was
awesome. We finished off the month at Art
of Beer in Niagara Falls, which was much
more low key, but the beer (and the people) were
every bit as good. Coming up in early March is Beerology at
the Buffalo Science Museum – then we’ll likely
take a break until it gets a bit warmer. Which
will be soon. Right??? Man, it sure would be
nice to serve beer at one of these events…
What's in the fridge?
WHO: North Coast Old Stock Ale
WHAT: Old Ale, 11.9% ABV
WHERE: Fort Bragg, CA
WHY: This is a great winter sipper. The color
is reddish/dark amber. The aroma is a bit
leathery, tobacco, some light roast and
chocolate. This beer is complex in many ways.
It’s very warming, with mild oakiness, some
plum-like malt, and a bit of an earthy finish.
Because of its strength, this is a great beer to
age – we tried the 2011, 2013, and 2014 together.
The ’11 was much mellower than the ’14, but it’s
really a good beer in any year. Sip this beer and
smile.
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Blogging: The reveal, part II
One of the earliest struggles with our fledgling
brewery was trying to determine how big the
equipment should be. We debated pros and cons of
“small v large” well over
18 months ago. Upon re-reading this post,
it’s clear that we were conflicted at the time,
being that a) there’s no definitive conclusion and
b) we, well, sort of asked our readers to help us
figure this one out. Well, we figured it out.
Read more…
What's brewing?
We are actually starting to wind down on
homebrewing as the opening of the brewery draws
nearer. We’ve now finished 6 different recipes
and we have only one left to go – our farmhouse
ale/saison, which we are brewing one more time
with a final attempt at blending yeasts to achieve
the flavor profile we are looking for.
Other than that, we’ve mostly been playing
around. We tried first
wort hopping our golden ale, which was an
interesting experiment – the beer was missing its
typical crisp hoppy finish, but instead featured a
bit more rounded bitterness and malt character.
It was still a really, really good beer, but I
don’t think we’ll be doing this technique at the
brewery. It’s fun to play around though!
We recently wrote about making an old ale (having
recently had Kuhnhenn’s
Bourbon Barrel 4th Dementia as well as North
Coast’s Old Stock Ale, to the left) as a
one-off batch for opening day, and the test batch
is coming up soon. We’ve decided to add a bit of
molasses to the beer to give it a rich, almost
syrupy flavor. Mmmmm.
After that – we really don’t have much else
planned for homebrewing. On to the big brewery we
go!
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