Beer + fridge = beer fridge

There’s nothing better than free stuff. Especially when that stuff is related to beer. Shelli, my manager at my day job (marketing consulting), graciously donated a full-sized refrigerator to the cause of Monday Night Brewery. We don’t have room to store it at Joel‘s yet, and we don’t need it for brewing until we build out a bigger system, so it has fallen on me to store it for now.

How unfortunate for me. Thanks Shelli!

Support homebrewers!

I was poking around on the interweb this morning and found a new (at least to me) homebrew blog, cleverly named Home Brew Beer. Bryon, like us, is brewing his own beer and blogging about it. Good stuff. Check it out.

And while I’m here, I should tell you that Joel is going to help me pick up a full-sized dedicated beer refrigerator tomorrow morning. Say WHAAAAT!?

British Beer: True Brew, Fun Novelty, or Warm Urine?

Several weeks ago, I spent a week in the U.K. (Scotland and England specifically). Over the course of the week, I tried at least a dozen different beers, sticking predominantly to British drafts. From Deuchers to Greene King to Old Peculiar to Triumph, I tasted what I have been reading for the past year – British beers are served with lower carbonation and at a higher temperature. From a taste standpoint, these beers without fail were much lower in bitterness than their American counterparts and tended to have a more pronounced malt profile with more wood flavors.

But here’s the thing. My good buddy Peter adores British beers (though not quite as much as Belgians). I think he sleeps with a pint on his bedside. I have talked to others who are confident that British beers are created simply by drunken Londoners urinating in a barrel of grain. I walked away glad for the opportunity to sample a new family of brews, but ultimately I just love American craft beers. So for those of you who have sampled British draft beers – true brew, fun novelty or warm urine?

Root, root, root for the beeeeeer team…

Those who came Monday night already know that we brewed up some root beer. Don’t worry, we had our priorities straight. Beer first, root beer second. Maybe even third. Once the beer brewing was underway I tiptoed inside and brewed up a 5 gallon batch of root beer on the stove. And just so everyone knows, there are 4 pounds of sugar in every 5 gallons of root beer. That’s how you know it’s good.

If smell is any indication, this stuff will taste delicious. We hope to have it carbonated and ready to serve next Monday.

P.S. I apologize to Andy for sloshing flat, tepid root beer all over his face. That root beer totally pwned his delicate features.

The Buffalo Theory (today’s beer nugget from Cliff Clavin)

Cliff Clavin of Cheers was a wise man. The kind of guy you’d recruit first for Trivial Pursuit. His knowledge of beer is no exception:

Well ya see, Norm, it’s like this… A herd of buffalo can only move as fast as the slowest buffalo. And when the herd is hunted, it is the slowest and weakest ones at the back that are killed first. This natural selection is good for the herd as a whole, because the general speed and health of the whole group keeps improving by the regular killing of the weakest members.In much the same way, the human brain can only operate as fast as the slowest brain cells. Excessive intake of alcohol, as we know, kills brain cells. But naturally it attacks the slowest and weakest brain cells first. In this way, regular consumption of beer eliminates the weaker brain cells, making the brain a faster and more efficient machine. That’s why you always feel smarter after a few beers.”

-Cliff Clavin

Thanks for the tip, West!

Laissez-Faire Barleywine? Yea or Nay?

Many of you are aware of the trouble we’ve had coming up with a suitable name for our barleywine, which will be available come Christmastime. When storing the barleywine, I wrote “Laissez-Faire” on the boxes to signify that people needs to keeps their grubby paws off of our masterpiece. Laissez-Faire represents, of course, the economic principle of a free market economy, in which the government keeps out of the grown man bidness. (Brad will be proud).

Jeff saw the boxes and determined that this would indeed be a good name for a brew. I concurred. Joel grumbled something. And thus it was decided.

Our dilemma is now to figure out what to put on the label. Our names and labels thus far have revolved around a character (a clown pirate IPA, a ninja pale ale, a lumberjack stout, etc.). We’d like to keep the streak alive. Unfortunately, we have no idea what to put on a label for a Laissez-Faire Barleywine. WE NEED YOUR IDEAS! THIS IS YOUR CHANCE TO BECOME IMMORTAL!

Interview with a Brewer (Part II)

We now present Part II of our 2-part interview with Steve Beauchesne of Beau’s All Natural Brewing. Steve started a brewery in Ontario with his father (see picture at left). For those who have not yet read Part I, it is well worth it. And for those who have no idea what is going on, MNB has begun to seek interviews from other homebrewers turned brewers.

The ultimate goal, of course, is to enter commercial brewing while committing as few mistakes as possible. We pick up with Steve with a question on something we hold near and dear, blogging:

4) Why the decision to blog? How has blogging been helpful?

I think that part of what makes beer interesting to beer drinkers is the story behind it. Learning about the trappist monks making Chimay or the origin of Pilsner Urquell or the trials that Dogfish Head went through is a part of the whole experience. To me, blogging was a very easy and very honest way to start to craft the story behind Beau’s All Natural Brewing Co. It is helpful, but like most of the marketing we do, it doesn’t have specific results I can point to. I can’t say sales are up x% because I blog, but when I talk to people for the first time, quite often they’ll ask me a question about something I’ve written about on the blog. That’s kinda cool.

5) What is one thing about the brewing industry that you wish you had anticipated going in?

We did a really good job of estimating costs and a horrible job of estimating how long things took. Our installation went on for something like 7 months, while we pulled our hair out trying to get it done.

6) How do recipes translate when moving from something like a 5 gallon batch to a 5BBL batch?

Not very well. We went from a homebrewed pilot recipe to a 20BBL batch and it definitely took a few batches to get it where we wanted it. Even moving from one system to another of the same size can create very different results we’ve found. We were honest about it to our customers and explained that these first few batches would have absolutely no consistency, as we tried to nail what we wanted it finally end up as. Most people understood this and were actually excited to try each batch to see how the taste evolved. A small minority felt that we should not sell our beer until it was exactly how we wanted it, but I figure there’s no point in trying to please absolutely everybody…we promised that we would make interesting and tasty beer but we never promised that the very first batch would be exactly what we intended.

7) When constructing a brewery, what decisions were the most important? If you had to build another brewery (and you probably will if you keep winning awards), what would you do differently?

The most important one that we made was that we weren’t going to comprimise anything when it came to the quality of the beer. The more difficult decisions were the ones that supported the first…I don’t know how many bars told us initially that there was no way they were going to pay extra for a beer they had never even heard of before and the pressure to price it lower was enormous. If we had buckled, it would have put us in a tail spin (less revenue means spend less on the beer which means the beer inevitably isnt as good).

The second decision was to take challenge of being ridiculously small and turn it into a virtue. When someone asks me my title, I never say I’m Vice President…I say I don’t have a title, cause we’re way too small for that. My business card reads “How’s it going, I’m Steve Beauchense. I help my dad run a great brewery.” The reason it works is because it’s honest. People are so used to marketing spin that when, instead of saying “let me check with my office manager,” I say “let me check with my mom” they are absolutely stunned.

If I could do it again, I’d have more money to start with. Small cash flow has slowed our potential growth (as it stands we’re growing at 30%/month, so I shouldn’t complain I suppose) and made many projects happen slower than they could have. I wouldn’t change much else though. We’ve made some goofy mistakes along the way, but nothing too serious…I remember we made a dispensing unit when we just started out and bought a $150 cooler, then cheaped out on the cooling coil and the stupid thing looked awesome and foamed all the way through our special events….but we learned, now we spend $25 on a cheap cooler and buy the most expensive cooling coil and the thing can pour non-stop in an August heat wave without a problem.

8) Do all of your friends and family expect free beer now? Yeah, I thought so…

Yeah, but I owe most of them more than they’ve received. I’ve been truly blessed with the most kick-ass friends (especially my wife) on the planet and they have come through time and time again for me and the brewery. I owe many, many people many, many beers to even the score.

We would like to thank Steve one last time for enlightening us. I don’t know how realistic it is to expect his beers down in Georgia in the next few years, but if you’re ever up North (I don’t know why anyone would be, but just in case), throw back a Lugtread for me.