Expansion Update 1: Hello New Kosme Bottling Line!

As some of you may have noticed, we announced (somewhat secretly) that The Bruery is expanding during 2014! Quality is a huge priority for us, and we are thrilled to be introducing some new (and pretty big) measures to make sure we are producing beer that excites us and and is exemplary of the highest quality.

An illustration of our brand new Kosme bottling line, which is on its way to us this year.

There are a couple phases of growth and equipment additions we're working on this year. One of the first items we're adding to our company is a brand new bottling line. Expected to arrive in July this year is a 16-head Kosme line from Krones, arguably the highest quality manufacturer of beer bottling lines in the world. The addition of this line to our production means we can look forward to several improvements once everything is up and running.

Careful Cellaring, Part 1: The Quality Assurance Process for Creating Clean, Living Beer

Before a beer leaves our brewery to go to your cellar, or your bottle share, or your mouth, it has a very busy schedule as it gets approved for its release into the world. We've explained previously how working with sours comes with its own trials and tribulations, but for cellared & aged beer month at The Bruery we think it's time to delve deeper into the steps it takes to produce and release clean, cellarable, living beer.

As many a craft beer lover may know, the brewing process requires a ton of cleaning and serious attention to sanitation. This attention to detail doesn't just apply to a single brew day. To make sure a beer can be sold and consumed as it was intended to taste, every part of every brew endures our quality assurance process. It takes all levels of staff to pull this off, including our brewers, lab ladies, packaging, cellarmen, and managers. We love to make experimental ales, but with each unique experiment comes new challenges for our team to monitor.

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?

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?