What better way to celebrate Presidents Day then to drive 50 miles to go drink beer. We came off riding a high from our SF Beer Week homebrewing event and carried the party all the way up north to Concord to go meet the owners of a recent brewery startup, Ale Industries. Dean and Tim pretty much went to as many SF Beer Week events as humanly possible, without getting fired for missing work. At a few of these events, these guys Morgan and Stephen were around talking about their experiences starting up a brewery over the past 18 months. An invite was extended to check out their facilities, so we jumped on that like a trampoline.
These guys are pretty much living the dream, at least our dream. We wanted to go in with a planned set of questions and possibly get some video as well. Being so last minute, and being that we haven’t interviewed people before, we decided to just stick with a few pictures and just have fun. The one thing that we did get emphasized over and over was the amount of cash needed to get started up. Our initial estimates was what we think times 2-3. They say do that and double it again. What’s so cool about Morgan and Stephen, is that they own the entire brewery. They sold everything but the dogs to get started up.
The lineup on tap was nothing short of amazing. The Orange Kush is a great session beer at 4.4% ABV. What takes it up a notch is the use of chamomile and sweet orange peel. The blend of these two makes you want more. The other beers on tap were the Rye’d Piper, Extra Pale Ale (out of a bottle), Winter Beer, and English Brown. We highly recommend you try some Ale Industries if you ever get the chance too. Cheers guys, we wish you the best.
Saturday marked our first hosted event. Without doubt it was a great success being able to not only make a batch of beer, but share some specialty stuff with some great people. A huge thank you to everyone who came out and had a beer or two with us throughout the day. It sucks we won’t be able to have a release party for the beer, but we’ll be sure to tell you how tasty it is
For your viewing pleasure, I give you pictures from the day.
*Here’s the link to the Flickr set. This is the first time I’m trying out the Flickr slideshow plugin. If it’s not working, let me know so we can go back to something that works.
Even though we’re technically not a business entity yet, we still like to act like one. We had some relatives with professional experience tweak the logo a bit and throw it on an epic layout. It’s not an earth shattering design, but we think it rocks. Totally a mullet of a business card….business in front, party in back.
BTW – I only blacked out my phone number so you hooligans don’t drunk dial me…just drunk email me instead.
It was a pleasure to see so many people come out to both the Double IPA fest this past Saturday, as well as the Winter Brew fest the Saturday before. What was even better, was seeing people come up to us out of the blue and tell us they were coming to our event on the 13th! It’s looking like we might actually have a decent turnout, even if it rains. That being said, we’re making the final preparations before the big day this Saturday.
The brew sculpture was built around 2000, which means it is pushing 70 in doggy years. So, we felt it was time to replace the hip and pop a viagra for Ol’ Betsy. Actually, we haven’t named our brewing sculpture. If you have a good name, give us some recommendations. We had to replace the gas regulator as well as upgrade the air hose from a 10 foot line with a rusty quick disconnect, to a 100 foot line with some shiny new stainless. The Super Bowl prevented us from giving it a test run, so that will have to wait for the night before the event. Hopefully it all works so we won’t be stuck without a brewing rig come Saturday morning. Knowing how things have turned out for us in the past, I’m wouldn’t be surprised if our kettle fell apart in transit.
All in all, we’re really excited to be hosting our first public event. We hope to see everyone who peruses this website to come stop by and have a few beers. Here’s what’s going to be on tap, in addition to the Jack’s regular lineup inside.
Beers On Tap
Dopplebock on oak
Double IPA on oak
Peppermint Porter
Orange Porter
Jack’s Regular Lineup
Boys of Summer Wheat
Hardwood Pale Ale
Grid Iron Amber Ale
Penalty Shot Porter
India Pale Ale
Apricot Mango
Hefeweizen
Red Ale
Looks like we might actually salvage the porter batch we so badly messed up a few weeks back. We kegged off 5 gallons as a base beer. We then split off the remaining 10 gallons off and added a lil something extra to each. We’re hoping it turns out good, in theory it should. The first 5 gallon experiment was put CO2 on Thursday, so hopefully we get to try it out a bit later this week. The second 5 gallon experiment is still sitting in secondary until we get a chance to clean some more kegs.
On a side note, we attended The Brewing Network’s Winter Brews Festival this past Saturday. It was great to see some of our old friends there and have some truly amazing beers. What was even more amazing was that the Jack’s Double IPA was the second beer to run out in the IPA section. This was the first production beer I was able to give input on and see my thoughts come to fruition. We will have this on on tap at our Homebrewing demonstration on the 13th, I highly recommend you come check it out. Hell, even people on Yelp say it’s better then Pliny!
Posted on February 23rd, 2010 by tsmith
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