2/15 Update: The beer is now available at the brewery and being sent out to stores around California. See Patrick Rue’s comments on the brewery’s barrel-aging program and exploration into sour beers below.]
(Placentia, CA) – For anyone wondering, I am pushing off Part II of the Twitter story until Monday or Tuesday. Too many new beers to write about at the moment and that takes first priority!
Instead of rehashing history, I will refer you to my article about
Saison de Lente
from earlier this month (beer description halfway down). The beer will be out early this spring or late winter depending on whether that pesky groundhog sees his shadow. Regardless, you could be seeing more summer seasonals than spring around this time. I’m not kidding.
Two more links of interest: The Bruery Flemish Red that Patrick Rue and Tyler King are working on. And if you are at work for a few more hours and you can turn up the volume on your work computer, check out The Brewing Network Interview from early November. A lot of good info in that one (Rue especially talks about the Tripel and Autumn Maple at length).
Hey Beersage and everyone,
We’re working to have Saison De Lente released around mid-February / early March. Due to problems we’ve had with getting label approvals in a timely fashion, we’ll be seeking TTB approval for new releases earlier than we previously have.
The Flemish Red has a long way to go– somewhere between next Fall and Spring 2010. The funk is the boss in this beer, so we don’t have much control over release dates. We’re expanding our sour beer program after leasing another warehouse (more room for barrels!). We expect to have our first bottled sour beer release sometime in the Spring with a beer tentatively named “Cuvee Jeune”, which translates to Young Vintage. Essentially it’s a young blended lambic, pretty tart and funky, but a good introduction for those just getting into sour beers. Our anniversary is also in May, we’ll have a special brewery-only release for this beer.
I’ll have to put a list of beers we’re coming out with on our blog in the next day, too many for me to keep track of sometimes! http://bruery.blogspot.com
Thanks for the mention!
Cheers,
Patrick Rue
The Bruery
Wow, that was fast. Nice.
Definitely understood on the sour beers. I know that Scott at Captain Lawrence and Tomme over at Lost Abbey battle those kinds of timing issues.
So is the funk all isolated to the second facility or do you have to be careful in both places? Also curious about what kind of funky strains you’re playing with. Just brettanomyces or are you experimenting with more?
The second warehouse is for storing raw materials (grain / bottles), and where our labeling / packaging operations will occur. Clearing all of this stuff out of our current brewery will allow room for about 300-350 barrels. The tasting room will be much more interesting place with all of these barrels around! We currently have about 70 barrels filled, so this will be quite a step up for us.
We use several strains of brett, sometimes individually and sometimes blended. Saison Rue uses brett. bruxellensis at bottling, and Saison De Lente will be fermented with this strain (in addition to our house strain). The sour culture we most frequently use has 3 strains of brett, pedio and lacto, as well as a traditional ale yeast strain. We don’t store our funky barrels separately from other barrels. We tend to have the funky barrels either on the bottom of a rack, or racked together as we don’t want any leakage making its way into non-funky beers. We have one fermenter that’s exclusively used for sour beers.
Patrick