Monday Night recap (Excited hops edition)

Monday was pretty much awesome. Some new folks, some old folks, and just enough rain to keep it interesting. We had some stellar beers on tap, including the Eye Patch Ale and Drafty Kilt Scotch Ale. We also tasted our 1-week-old double IPA. Gravity was down to 1.021 from 1.070 in a week, which is great news. And initial taste tests indicate that this could be a very nice beer. Well-balanced and hoppy in all the right ways.

Not to be outdone, our homegrown hops have been busy growing. Like this 3-year-old Cascade:

Cute little bugger. We also learned a valuable lesson on Monday. People will do stuff for you if you give them free beer. The key is to say everything with a straight face. That’s how we suckered Colin into digging a hole for us.

Note: upper body not shown to keep this blog PG. Despite the rain, Colin dug a post hole for our new hop trellis. I do believe we could have asked Colin to wax Joel’s back and he would have said yes. We’re excited about this new double IPA, which should be ready to drink in 3-4 weeks. We’re more excited about our Eye Patch Ale and Drafty Kilt. Only a few more tweaks to the Eye Patch and we should have it where we want it (that’s what she said?).

In other news, our friends Cigar City and Metropolitan Brewing got written up in a little thing called the Wall Street Journal!

Brewing tonight

Just a quick note ? while we won’t be actually brewing tonight because Joel decided to schedule his spray-tanning appointment for the same time as Monday Night festivities, we will be having people over between 8:00ish-10:30ish. Notice the ish’s. We should have 3 beers on tap for as long as our CO2 tank holds up.

Interview with a brewer: LoneRider Brewing Co. in NC

LoneRider Brewing Co. is a brand spankin’ new brewery in Raleigh, NC. Yes, another new craft brewery in the South, which makes us infinitely happy. Their flagship, Shotgun Betty, is a 5.3% Bavarian-style wheat beer. We sat down with CEO Sumit (who we found on Twitter). After you’ve gotten to know Sumit and LoneRider, make sure to read past interviews with brewers. Thanks to LoneRider for indulging us, we wish you success and hope to try your beer soon!

1) For readers that may be unfamiliar, give us a sense of who you guys are and what you’re about.

We are three partners who started the brewery out of a desire to brew great beer, and get more control of direction we wanted our lives to go in. We met while working at Cisco. I have moved over to work at Quintiles now, and both my partners still work at Cisco. I refer to the movie, ‘Office Space’, as a perfect example of our start though we never had to write TPS reports, and we actually like our jobs. But we do have cubes!

2) How did you get into beer brewing?

Steve has been a home brewer for a long time and has been the influence on both Mihir and I to get into brewing.

3) How did you decide to launch with a hefeweizen? At first glance it doesn’t seem the obvious choice.

Funny how the style we like becomes the beer of choice. Seriously, besides that, we looked at the market and saw that nobody was brewing a German Hefeweizen locally as a flagship. We also saw how wheat beers, and session beers were becoming more popular. With the proliferation of great beers in the market we had to look for ways to differentiate ourselves. We also have plans to come up with great 60 bbl (or 30 bbl) releases.

4) You’ve accomplished a lot in one year while keeping your day jobs. How much longer do you plan on working full-time and who will be making the leap into full-time brewing first?

I don’t remember last time I went to bed before 2 or 3 at night. It’s just become a part of the daily routine. We would like to transition working full time at the brewery, but its not going to happen for a while. Don’t get us started on who wants to transition first, because we all do. Time and need will determine who can.

5) What single marketing tactic has had the most unexpected return for you thus far?

I would say we have gotten the most compliments on our rebel image, and how the *characters (beers)* of our brewery display a common theme.

6) If you were to build another brewery from scratch (perfectly hypothetical), what is one thing you would do different next time around?

Phew ! That would be a long list. First, quit any full time jobs! Haha.

On a serious note, one thing would be to raise ‘much more than needed’ capital so that we are not always stressed out. In quite a few areas our projected costs got to be 50% more than anticipated. Completely unexpected things happened, for example during inspection, that required capital we hadn’t planned for.

7) That all sounds great. Any plans to be in Georgia?

Can’t even stand yet in NC mate, Georgia is a distant possibility right now.

The difference between homebrewing and commercial brewing

First, let the record show that we are still technically homebrewers. But after being entrenched in the homebrewing culture for a few years now, and after having some exposure to the professional brewing culture as well, we thought it might be interesting to point out one of the fundamental differences between the two. There are obviously more differences, some of which I’m sure we will probably learn the hard way.

While we homebrew (only brewing small batches and never selling anything), we approach the art with a focus on the future, specifically commercial production. What does this mean? Realistically we will only be able to launch with a few beers (we are targeting two), and so we need those two beers to be as good as they can possibly get.

Homebrewing traditionally has been a bastion of experimentation and creative expression. Charlie Papazian’s phrase, “Relax, don’t worry, have a homebrew,” has become a rallying cry to many homebrewers. Homebrewers embrace the unexpected and even seek it out in their beers.

We, however, have been brewing the same couple beers with only minor tweaks in controlled environments for years now. After becoming relatively comfortable with an initial recipe, it has been our blessing and curse to massage every last drop of goodness out of that recipe that we can. We brew the same IPA, over and over, trying to get it one iota closer to where we want it to be. Once we’re past the concept phase, we brew for consistency, not creativity.

Most commercial breweries (even craft breweries) deal with this same truth. It isn’t uncommon for a particular beer to be 70-80% of a craft brewery’s sales. Think Fat Tire from New Belgium. Or closer to home, 420 from Sweetwater. In those cases, the time for experimentation are indeed over, and consistency is the key to success.

That’s not to say that the two viewpoints are mutually exclusive. This great article points to the fact that many craft breweries are still rooted in homebrewing:

?I?d say over 90 percent of small brewers I talk to today have roots in home brewing,? says Papazian, who now serves as president of the Brewers Association, a trade group. ?The creativity and innovation they?ve brought to the business has been amazing. The American wheat beers. The fruit beers, the honey beers, the chocolate beers. They were all homebrews first.?

In fact, much of the craft beer revolution we’ve experienced in the U.S. grew out of a response against the bland macro lagers. Creativity is a natural part of this uprising. But once you make it, you need to make it consistently or you’ll be going home.

Brewing for consistency can wear on you. We obviously look forward to the day when actual production will free up our homebrewing to experiment more (time permitting). But for now, we’ve embraced this necessary dichotomy at Monday Night Brewery. We work hard to create not great beers, but consistently great beers.

Thoughts from any homebrewers or professional brewers out there? We’d love to hear them.

Brewing recap: Hawaiian edition

We brewed a double IPA last night for the first time in over a year. We love double IPA’s but we decided to de-prioritize it as a style, with good reason. Brewing went smoothly. The weather was incredible. We had an extra hour of sunlight. And after all was said and done, we got a chance to try some beers from Maui Brewing Co. We interviewed Garrett from Maui a while back and have been hankering to try his brews ever since.

Frequent blog commenter and Monday Night attendee “John A” brought back a 6-pack of Maui beers from his honeymoon in Hawaii, where he actually visited the brewery. John, we love you for that. Last night we tried three Maui beers: Bikini Blonde Lager, Big Swell IPA and Coconut Porter. All three were delicious.

We aren’t huge lager fans, though we appreciate the usefulness of a lager on a hot day at the beach. But the Bikini Blonde actually had a nice malty backbone to it.

The Big Swell IPA was nice and hoppy. I can see it going very well with spicy foods (or spicy men, like Joel in the above picture).

And the Coconut Porter. Delightful. Most of the coconut was in the nose ? the beer tasted very rich and chocolatey, which was a great combo. I’ll be the first to tell you that I hate coconut, but there is a very big difference between fresh coconut and those shaved dandruff flakes you buy in the store. Fresh coconut wins.

Kudos to Garrett and Maui Brewing, you guys are doing it right over there!

Happy birthday Joel!

Joel was born 28 years ago, yada yada yada, we’re brewing tonight.

Without Joel, there’s no Monday Night Brewery. Because without Joel, there’s no one to paint the bottom of our fermentation chamber:

Though we outsourced his job to India, we still love him. Come by tonight to celebrate his birthday. We should have 3 beers on tap and we’ll be brewing a double IPA for the first time in 2 years. Hope to see you there!

Our contact form hasn’t worked in months. Oops.

We realized this week that we haven’t gotten any emails from our contact form in literally months. Which is odd, if you really think about it, but I guess not odd enough to invite an investigation.

So, if you sent us ANYTHING in the last 3-4 months and we didn’t respond to you, it’s probably because we hate you we didn’t receive it. So sorry. Our email addresses on the the contact page (scroll down) still work. We are also impervious to spam, in case you were curious.

Accept our sincere apologies. Or don’t. But either way, please resend anything we didn’t respond to.