Meet the Homebruer: Brian Cockle

Brian Cockle is one of the silent heroes here at The Bruery. He keeps our tech stuff running smoothly during the day, but is a homebrewer and dad by night. He's a bit notorious for his huge & techy homebrew set up, which you can see even more of over on his blog.

When did you start homebrewing?
Like a lot of people, I started homebrewing back in college.

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.

Sensory School: Time to Taste

On your path to sensory enlightenment you've learned how much aroma matters in the perception of flavor, but the other half of the experience comes from taste (the remainder of sensory that starts in your mouth).

The human tongue can detect five different tastes, and the rest of the flavor experience comes from your nose. Once beer enters your mouth, you'll perceive the tastes of sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and umami on your tongue. When tasting a beer, it's important to let it really cover all parts of your tongue, because as you'll see in the following (and kind of gross) diagram, those taste buds are all over the place ... as are gustatory hairs. Eeeeew.

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.

We're Famous! In Belgium, at Least

We were part of a Belgian TV Show segment while visiting 3 Fonteinen during our pilgrimage! Check out Patrick, Matt, Carl, Ben and Tyler in the clip starting at about 2:03



Thanks to our very astute Facebook fan Kevin Dvs, we have a translation of what master brewer and lambic blender Armand Debelder is talking about after we handed off some of our beer to him!

Basically they are saying that a lot of americans are visiting 3 Fonteinen. The commentator says that it is unbelievable how much these americans know about Armand's brewery and that they almost see Armand as an idol; they have an unlimited respect for him. 

Armand himself doesn't understand this hype around his person. After the conversation in English (when Armand is pouring some gueuze) he says that his brewery is some kind of Disneyland for American brewmasters. Then he says that he visited USA in June, and when he told people he is a belgian brewer, Americans considered him as a rockstar and wanted pictures with him. 

The commentator says 3 Fonteinen was almost broke 15 years ago but because of the big interest from American customers and other foreigners, they survived. Now they can't keep up with the orders from abroad. If Armand wants to, he can sell all his stock to American customers but he doesn't do that because he's loyal to his local customers. 50% is export.

Kevin kindly explained the highlights of the rest of the piece as well:

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.

HomebRued from Batch 1 to 1000, and Beyond!

For milestone batches like our first, 50th, 300th, and now our 1000TH BREW!!!, we've asked you guys to enter beers in our homebrew competitions. After the best recipe was selected, we brewed a limited quantity at our place with the winning homebrewers.

We're pretty excited about brewing our 1000th batch of beer this year. The recipe for our upcoming Batch 1000 comes from Brian Pramov & Bryan Keas of Denver, CO. Their hoppy dark rye, Night Ryder, won this round's competition beating out 199 other entries. In the spirit of Batch 1000, we'll be profiling some of our very own hombrewers homebruers on our staff in the coming weeks here on our Bruery Blog.

Mash, Grind, Blend, Taste, Repeat

We've made a coffee beer with Portola Coffee Lab before. Those of you in our Hoarders Society may recall our most recent beer using Porotla's beans: Mélange 8 is our blend of our bourbon barrel aged wheatwine (White Oak Sap), our bourbon barrel aged anniversary ale and Don Pachi Estate Geisha coffee beans, literally the most expensive beans in the world. This time, Jeff and Patrick came together to try some blends using a couple different kinds of roasts that don't have a $111 per pound price tag but we still think are downright delicious.



Finding the right level of coffee to blend with our beer pretty much replicated the process of making a cup or coffee or tea, except there was a 12.5% beverage involved.

Six Questions on Becoming a Certified Cicerone

The word Cicerone (pronounced sis-uh-rohn) has been chosen to designate those with proven expertise in selecting, acquiring and serving today’s wide range of beers ... Only those who have passed the requisite test of knowledge and tasting skill can call themselves a Cicerone. -- Cicerone.org

Tomorrow is another round of the Certified Cicerone® exam in Southern California and we look forward to supporting this organization by offering up our conference room to host the testing. Our very own Patrick Rue and Director of Marketing Benjamin Weiss are both Certified Cicerones® so it seemed like the perfect opportunity to ask Ben a couple questions about becoming a Cicy!

Bourbon Barrel Aged Bois -- Part 1 of 5 of Our Anniversary Beers

Five years ago, I couldn't have fathomed what The Bruery is today. We've reached this point due to a lot of hard work, allowing creativity to steer our direction, being constructively critical of ourselves, and taking on significant risks along the way. The next five years should be just as exciting. I'm so thankful for the wonderful people I get to work with who put their heart and soul into their work, and our customers who support our brewing habit! -- Patrick Rue

May is our anniversary month and we are excited to release Bois (pronounced "Bwah!"), our fifth anniversary ale this week! This beer is brewed in the English-style Old Ale tradition using our house Belgian yeast strain and then blended using the solera method, where a portion of each of our anniversary ales is saved in our barrels and blended in with the next year's production, providing more complexity and depth of character that comes with age.

In our fifth year, we've decided that using just one kind of barrel is not enough for this beer. Five separate small batches of Bois have been quietly resting in five different kinds of barrels: bourbon, rye, brandy, new American oak, and French oak.

So what kind of differences will you see between these batches? We're studying each type of spirit and barrel for the month of May to discuss just that. For week one, we're going to look a little closer at the beautiful world of bourbon.

Four Years... Goes By Quick!

I apologize to all of you in blogland.  First off, I apologize for not contributing to the blog.  I've avoided writing here for a very long time, and while I'd like to commit to more blog posts, I feel that doing so won't actually help in me posting more frequently.  Secondly, I apologize for not being more timely with this post!  I was supposed to write about our four years of being in business during our anniversary month, but with the ten anniversary events our 31 days of May archive promotion, new fermenters, Tasting Room and related construction, and all of the other changes going on at The Bruery, I couldn't find the time!

My life four years ago versus now is completely different.  On June 13th, 2008, Tyler was The Bruery's only employee.  The two of us did everything.  Brewing, bottling, labeling, cleaning, bookkeeping, sales, compliance, the list goes on.  Actually, we did have some great volunteers who helped bottle.  Some of their wives still haven't forgiven them for the 12+ hour days of bottling (and as a result, coming home smelling like a brewery).  One of the early volunteers, Ben Weiss, became a legitimate part time employee on June 23rd.  In all of 2008, we brewed the equivalent of what we now brew in less than a week.  While each task was fairly minimal given our size at the time, it was a ton of work because it was the first time I was doing any of these tasks, other than cleaning toilets!

We sold our beer in Southern California exclusively with about six accounts, and on June 9th, we sent our first shipment to Stone Brewing Co.  It consisted of 12 kegs of Black Orchard, 55 cases of Batch No. 1, 55 cases of Saison Rue, 55 cases of Orchard White, 12 kegs of Orchard White, 5 cases of glassware, and 18 tap handles (which we made ourselves).  

Pallets of Batch No. 1 - Levud's in the brewery.

This first order was the biggest order we'd ship to them until November of 2008.  I had no idea what to expect as far as sales volume in the first year, and I was very afraid about brewing too much and having a bunch of beer I couldn't sell.  Plus, I was running out of cash and literally couldn't afford to purchase kegs or more bottles until we sold what we already packaged.  It was part of the plan to put beer into bourbon and wine barrels to kick off our barrel aging program, and this made up a significant amount of production in the first year.  I believe we filled around 50 barrels between June and December of 2008.  We had four fermenters, and at this point we likely only had Trade Winds Tripel in the fermenter.  Three fermenters were empty, something today that would drive me nuts!  This batch of Trade Winds only used thai basil from my backyard.  This basil bush went from amazingly full with flowers and leaves to being a bundle of sticks after this first 30 BBL batch.  We bottled that batch on June 23rd, and weren't able to sell it until mid-August.  Nowadays we start selling Trade Winds in April.  When October came around and we started selling Autumn Maple, we still had quite a bit of Trade Winds in inventory that we had to sell by the case from the tasting room at a steep discount.  By the end of the year, my wife Rachel came on board to manage the books and Jonas came on board to help in the tasting room.  The first year for The Bruery was very difficult.  My Dad (my business partner and The Bruery president) and I met every few weeks, and I'd bring the current financial reports and we'd compare them to projections.  Those were disappointing times to say the least.  There is nothing worse than trying to raise more money than when you're in the process of losing it.  We lost a ton of cash, it was a lot of work, but somehow I have mostly fond moments of that time.  The beer must have kept me happy!

Comparing our first year to our fourth year is tough-- we might as well be talking about two different breweries.  We now have 45 employees, and will likely hit over 50 employees within the next few months.  We are distributed in 20 states (plus DC), a few countries, and we're able to sell everything we produce.  What a great situation to be in, right?!  On an ongoing basis, 40% of our production goes into oak barrels, where on average it will age for 14 months.  Our barrel aged beers include everything from rich stouts to sour ales and other experimentations.

The new Tasting Room in progress.

We are also building a new cellar with 130% more stainless fermentation capacity than we currently have, a new tasting room, a pilot brewhouse, more warehousing space, and a dedicated QC lab!  Thankfully, The Bruery isn't losing money anymore. However, we are spending everything we have to build this new part of our brewery, and invest in our barrel aged beers where we won't see a return for some time.  My tasks have gone from doing everything at the brewery to just doing what I want to work on, or at least that's the goal.  It's a spectacular thing, but to be honest, I'm still stressed!  It's just part of my personality that probably won't go away, no matter how good things are going.

I look forward to the next four years, and wonder how I'll perceive myself and The Bruery of 2012 in 2016.  Will I consider The Bruery of 2012 to be as small as I now consider The Bruery of 2008?  Or will I have overestimated our demand, and find myself selling cases in the tasting room at a steep discount?  I'm also curious where the craft brewing industry will be in 2016-- will we reach 10%+ marketshare, or will there be less breweries than today?  All I know is it'll be an interesting ride.

Thank you to all of our supporters, including our fans, loyal accounts, distributors, suppliers, writers, current and past employees, for making The Bruery's success possible!  This isn't just The Bruery's anniversary, it's all of our anniversary.  I look forward to the continued opportunity to celebrate life and great beer with you.

Cheers,

Patrick

The Bruery

Video - On Sour Ales

Our barrel aging program has a strong focus on sour beers.  Here is a short video featuring Patrick, Tyler and Jay, describing some of the basics behind sour beers.

Enjoy!