Photo Credit: YardsBrewing.com

BN: Is there anything new coming out this year?

TK: We’re investing more into our pilot brewery, Yards One, so we plan on having more of the fun things here at our tasting room. Some of them will be old recipes like Old Ale, Entire Porter, and Imperial Stout. We’ll probably do a smoked beer for our Smoke ‘Em If Yous Got ‘Em event. It’s always a place for our brewers to experiment and our packaging line guys to come in and brew and have a little fun. It’s a morale thing.

SM: In the next four months, we’ll have an Altbier, Weizenbock, a collaboration with homebrewers for Philly Beer Week…our guys also want to make a Kölsch. On the production side, we’ll also be adding in Trubbel de Yards this year.

TK: Cape of Good Hope will be back out in August; it will be a little different than it was last year, that’s the progression…it will never quite be the same year to year. Overall, we tend to stick with our core brands.

BN: So we shouldn’t expect a Yards Pumpkin, or Yards Harvest Ale at any point?

TK: Absolutely not. People scream at us “Do a pumpkin, it’ll be great.” Not gonna happen.

BN: Are there any plans to expand the Ales of the Revolution line?

TK: We wish we had a fourth one, but I wonder if that would be too confusing. It really works for the twelve pack; four each of our three beers.  If someone else has a recipe, I’d be happy to try it. We encourage people who sell our beer that need seasonals to take our Ales of the Revolution line and seasonalize it in their own way. Some of them have had so much success going, “This is available now. You have to buy it now or else you’re not getting it,” that they don’t know how to sell any other way. It is against our philosophy. We think that our beers are good enough that they should have it on year-round.

BN: Are there any plans to bottle your bourbon-aged beers? 

SM: Yeah, we’re looking to do 750 bottles in limited runs. I don’t know if it will happen this year. We just started our barrel program 2 years ago. We’re getting better at it, still trying to understand best practices.

TK: We currently don’t distribute them, except for promotions. For barrels, we get ten sixtels, sometimes nine, so that limits things.

BN: Will we ever see Love Stout in a bottle?

SM: We hope someday we have the widget technology or tension point figured out. There’s a grad student in UK working on a project, which is a microfiber link to allow nitrogen to be released. Crazy technology. Who knows what it’ll hold in terms of technology in the future. Right now, we don’t have Guinness-type money to put into the research and development side of it.

—

In Part Two of the interview, Kehoe and Mashington share their thoughts on the state of the craft beer industry, what Philadelphia means to them, and the influence of the internet community. Look for it soon.

Chris Ferullo loves craft beer. An IT business analyst by day, he moonlights as a hophead and proponent of the Philly beer scene. Ferullo practiced journalism in college and is the first writer to join the BeerPulse team.

Follow @chrisferullo