Being homemade means we can’t sell our beers, at least not yet. Maybe down the road - some day - we will go commercial. That doesn’t mean we can’t talk about the beers though! We first started brewing by making clones of popular beers, but we quickly became more creative and adventurous. Sometimes we return to our original homebrew roots and try to clone the beers love that we can’t source locally.
Every part of brewing beer is an adventure. We start with an inspiration: the taste of a new brew or a unique ingredient that pops out at us.
Next comes the research. What is it about this new beer we like so much? How do others use this ingredient that has snagged our interest? Once we have a rough idea of what we want to do we’ll start working on a recipe. It’s a collaborative effort: we’ll both make adjustments to the recipe to get the correct balance of flavor, color, and alcohol content. Since we love to tinker, we’ll often continue making small changes to the recipe right up until brew day.
Unlike commercial breweries, our brew days are almost never the same. While we do have a well defined process, something is always changing. Learning something new, changes in vendors, equipment, the weather, and even improvements in the process itself can impact the final product.
We even enjoy hearing the bubbles of CO2 coming out of the fermenter’s blowoff tube. Those first bubbles are highly anticipated. It’s important to know when fermentation starts and stops: it it a vital part of the beer making process. Once fermentation is complete, we can try the very first sample. We may find out if our recipe met our expectations, if we’ve missed the mark, or we may just shrug and have to be a little more patient. Next up, the beer is moved into a stainless steel keg and into cold storage. Our aging process, at this point, is pretty loose. It is driven more by how quickly our taps run dry or even by our tasting moods.
Of course, we have our favorite seasonal beer styles. While we may make these staples every year, we usually adjust and refine the recipes. Every once in a while though, we find one so good we just have to make it again.