Week 32

Week 32? so what happened to to weeks 29 through 31 you may ask.

Well, there are several reasons, not least the fact that we are very busy. As I am sure I have previously mentioned, I still have a full time job, which means I cant be at the brewery as much as I really want to be. This leaves Gregg to pick up the slack with deliveries, packaging, sales, brewing, the list is endless. This means I don't always have the time to be blogging, and sometimes I just haven't been around enough to feel that I can write about what has been going on.

Also, as we become older and more established, we are not having to overcome new or interesting issues. So I don't always feel that a blog would be interesting, or relevant. I really don't want to bore or waste peoples time, there is beer to be drunk don't you know.

So what has happened since my last blog.

At the time of writing the last blog, Gregg was in the brewery with our good friend Andy Parker from Elusive Brewing. They were brewing the second in our Single Hop Series, which just so happened to be our second collaborative brew with a home brewer going pro. The beer that was created on that day was Nelson Saison, which as the cryptic name suggests, is a saison hopped with just Nelson Sauvin. This has been packaged and is currently conditioning, as we feel a little age will help this one out.

We have brewed quite a few different beers in our short life time, but as we sell out of certain beers, and the demand for these grow ever louder, it has become clear that we need to focus a little more on our core range. So over the last few weeks we have re-brewed Mariana Trench and Five O'clock Shadow, with Black Perle in the next week, if the lactose we ordered 2 weeks ago ever arrives. Along with the release of Hit The Lights.

One of our first beers that went down very well in bottle, Single Hop Chinook, has had a mixed reception on cask. Some people have absolutely loved it, while a couple of places have not had so much luck. So a little while ago we decided that we would keep back the last few casks we had for something special. We knew this beer would age well, and it became clear to us that it would age even better in an American bourbon barrel. So that's what we did. Look out for this very limited edition in the next few months.

Not wanting to stray too far from our experimental home brew roots, we haven't totally devoted our time to the core range. Summer is a time when it's nice from time to time to spend the day in the garden, or pub drinking beer, responsibly of course. If you talk to Gregg, he would tell you that sipping on a Saison on a hot summers day is the preferred approach. But these can come in a little high on the alcohol for a good session, so we decided to brew our very own answer to this problem. Little Things That kill, another beer named after a song, is our version of a low alcohol session beer. There will be a full blog at some point, but this is the little brother of Holy Hoppin' Hell. A sub 4% beer brewed to the same grain bill each time, but hops for each batch will change.

It must be something to do with our own beginnings, but we seem to have a thing for home brewers going pro. To feed our apatite for this, we will be brewing another collaboration beer with a couple of home brewers going pro. This time round a Belgian Triple with a U.S. hops, brewed with our friends from Northern Monk in a couple of weeks time.

We did have some other home brewers in the brewery last week, but this time with no plans to go pro. A couple of our friends wanted a special beer for their special day, so requested we brewed something for them. We decided to go one step further and get them to brew it. We sat down and bounced some ideas off each other and decided on something that they and their guests will really enjoy, that we will enjoy, and just so happened to fit into our Single Hop Series. Expect something Belgian with shed loads of Amarillo.

Beer continues to fly out of the brewery, with cask sales especially popular. In fact, we often sell out of casks before a beer is even released, so if there is anything you fancy, get in quick. This throws up an interesting problem. We are selling a lot of casks at the moment, but we make very little money on them, although people still complain they are over priced. If we put more beer into casks, we could sell a batch of beer very quickly, but make very little money. The answer to this is to obviously brew more often, but we are held back by our size, and the number of fermenters we own. We can't grow as a business or buy more fermenters without first making money, which we simply cant do with just cask. So we are upping the cask output on certain beers, but we are still focussing on bottle. We also like bottles as we can send these out of London, so more people get the opportunity to sample what we are doing.

In other good news, we have finally got two pallets of beer out to Sweden. So you can now find our beers in Sweden and Italy along with all over the UK. So if you are yet to try any, you have little excuse.

We have a very busy summer ahead of us, as we need to get 10 different beers on cask for an event we are very excited about later this summer. Look out for an announcement on this soon. Also look out for us at a number of beer festivals. Please continue to check out the bottom of our outlets page to keep up to date.

All opinions and grammatical errors are those of WeirdBeardBryan, and not always Weird Beard Brew Co. as a whole. For example, Gregg LOVES saisons, I could live without them.