(Placentia, CA) – The Bruery is pumping out a lot more beer than it did at this time last year and that trend will only continue into 2013.

As part of reporting on The Bruery’s new 1,100 square-foot tasting room and near-tripling of its taps to 40, The L.A. Times adds that the brewery now has 1,500 barrels filled. That would likely put it second to Goose Island in the U.S. which is fast-approaching 2,500 barrels filled. [Note: The Brewers Association doesn’t track this data.]

And the company isn’t stopping there. Founder and CEO, Patrick Rue, told BeerPulse last July:

[…] we have space for 3,000 oak barrels (or around 5,000 BBL). We’re currently at 600 barrels filled, and we’ll get to around 2,000 barrels filled by the end of 2012. Our average aging time in the barrel is 16 months. When we reach our maximum capacity of 3000 barrels we’ll be able to rack about 75% of that on an annual basis. What does all of this mean? Next year we’ll start distributing our barrel aged beers, and availability will increase over the next 3 years.

The current barrel room total represents an increase of 150% off of last summer’s total. The significant change is part of The Bruery’s renewed focus on its barrel-aging program, one that the company detailed last May:

As you might already know, we’ve been operating at capacity for over the last year and a half; a near doubling of capacity in January of this year has been a mere drop in the bucket. We’ve reached a fork in the road. One path is to open a much larger brewery that would satisfy demand over the long term, and accumulate millions of debt and bring on outside investors to get to that point. The other path is renewal of our original vision: a small, family-owned business making some of the most interesting, highest-quality specialty beers available in the market in our own unique way. After much debate, research and soul-searching, we’ve chosen the latter path – but on a grander scale.

Part of the company’s investment comes from its own Reserve Society membership base of 1,350 members. That is approximately $400,000 in annual consumer investment or nearly eight times what the most successful Kickstarter brewery campaigns generate.

As for overall production, The OC Register reports that the company will “expand about 60 percent this year, then another 40 percent next year.” Production in 2011 was 3,600 barrels brewed. Brewing capacity is approximately 11,000 barrels annually.