Pilot Brewing

The pilot brewing system arrived about a month ago and I immediately put it into service brewing test batches. Here’s a quick rundown of some things we’ve been working on:

Thai/asian spiced Belgian witbier: The idea for this beer came to me when I heard about the Bruery’s Tradewinds Tripel, which is a tripel spiced with fresh basil leaves. I’m a big fan of Thai food, so I thought that ginger and lemongrass would work nicely in a witbier. For the spicing I used fresh lemongrass and ginger root, along with a blend of Indian coriander and normal coriander. The Indian coriander has a much brighter, fruiter quality than the regular coriander, which has a heavier, woody aroma. This beer turned out really well and there’s a good chance some version of it will make it into Westbrook Brewing’s main lineup.

Table Saison: Saison is one of our favorite beer styles, but most of the examples around today tend to be fairly high (7% or greater) in alcohol content. So, we thought it would be great to have a really flavorful saison that won’t knock you out if you drink two (or more) glasses of it. To make it interesting, we hopped it with the Sorachi Ace hop, which has a really great lemony, grassy character. This one also came out really well. I think it would make a good summer seasonal.

Belgian IPA: This is a tricky one. I’ve brewed several versions, ranging from a standard American IPA fermented with a Belgian yeast to a Belgian tripel with American hops. The problem is that Belgian yeasts have characteristics that sometimes don’t blend well with or get obscured by the assertive American hop varieties. The next iteration of this beer will probably be a strong golden ale base with mainly English/continental European hops. I plan to split the batch 4 ways and ferment it with 4 different Belgian yeasts to see what happens.

Quadruple/Belgian Strong Dark: This is a fairly standard quad, around 12% abv. Rather than use a lot of specialty malts like some recipes do, I stuck with mostly pale and Munich malts, with dark candi syrup added for dryness and flavor. A beer like this is a great base for experimentation, and right now I have some souring with a blend of cultures I’ve grown from various bottles of commercial lambics and other sour beers.

100% Brett Blonde: This is basically a Belgian blonde ale, but fermented entirely with Brettanomyces Claussenii, which is a strain of “wild” yeast isolated from an English stock ale. This beer smells extremely funky, but has a surprisingly mellow, pleasant flavor with just a hint of sourness. A lot of people who say they aren’t “beer drinkers” who have tried this beer seem to like it a lot.

Maximum Strength Golden Ale: South Carolina’s legal limit for the alcohol content of beer is 17.5% by volume, so naturally we need to brew a beer that’s right up there! The first version came out to a little over 16%, but can easily be bumped up on the next go. We added honey, Muscat grape concentrate, and unrefined dark sugar during the fermentation, which gave the beer a really beautiful deep gold color. There’s some honey-like sweetness up front, but the beer finishes dry enough to be dangerously drinkable.

Those are just some of the highlights; we’ve got a lot more up our sleeve!

Brooklyn Beer Dinner @ Chai's

Heard about this from the SC Brewer's Association site, reserved our tickets last night. Garrett Oliver wrote the book (literally) on beer and food pairing so this should be a fantastic event. Hope to see some of you there!

Biz Update

Thought everyone might like an update on where we are in terms of actually getting the brewery up and running, so here goes:

Location - We've narrowed it down to two possibilities, one in Mt. Pleasant and one in the upper peninsula area of downtown Charleston. We'll be making a final decision on this fairly soon. Once the location is nailed down, we can make plans for any necessary construction/renovation, buy equipment, and get the TTB approval process rolling.

Equipment - We know that we want to start with a 25 or 30 barrel (bbl) capacity brewhouse (1 bbl = 31 gallons). It takes the same amount of labor to brew 7 barrels (average size of a brewpub system) as it does to brew 30 barrels, so we figure it's best to get the biggest system we can afford. We've been looking at various sources of new and used equipment and are ready to go as soon as the brewery location is certain.

Pilot Brewing - I just moved down to Charleston permanently last month and have been brewing on the 5 gallon all-grain "system" I started with more than 3 years ago (system in quotes because it's not really a system at all, just a bunch of misc. stuff). I've brewed some great beer with that equipment but it's much too labor intensive and can only make 5 gal. at a time, so I've ordered a shiny new 20 gallon brewsculpture from MoreBeer, which should be arriving in about a month. This should help me be more consistent from batch to batch and also make it easier to split batches between multiple fermenters to experiment with different yeasts, dry hopping , etc.

Government approval - Alcohol producers are regulated by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB). In order to apply for the Brewer's Notice (basically the federal license that allows you to operate a brewery) you need to have your location, your facility/equipment layout, and a bunch of other stuff. Once we get the Brewer's Notice, we'll be able to apply for a license from the SC Dept. of Revenue.

As you can see we have a lot of work ahead of us before we can actually start brewing beer. Our goal is to be open for business by this time next year, which I think is definitely possible.

Beer!

One thing I’m sure everyone wants to know is what kind of beer we’ll be brewing. Initially this was a hard question for us to answer because there are so many possibilities! We did know that we didn’t want to be a brewery that brews any and all beer styles. We would much rather pick one area to focus on and do it really, really, really well instead of doing a lot of different things that are “pretty good.”

The next thing we thought about was the types of beers that are already out there. Right now is probably the best time ever to be a beer drinker in America. There are loads of high-quality, interesting beers that are (relatively) widely available. Our craft brewing culture is the envy of beer lovers worldwide. Breweries in Europe are now being influenced by us, instead of the other way around! In order to stand out from the many other excellent breweries out there, it’s important to be different. I personally love a great IPA or pale ale, but there’s so many of them already! The same thing with a lot of the big American styles – imperial red, imperial stout, imperial IPA – anything with “imperial” in the name has probably been beaten to death, or nearly so, by craft brewers. Not to say that there’s anything wrong with those styles, or that we don’t enjoy drinking them (we do) but there’s not too much else you can do with those styles as a brewer that hasn’t already been done.

A beer genre that we think hasn’t been fully explored, especially in the Southeast, is Belgian-style beer. Luckily for us, that’s what we like to drink the most! At the recent Brewgrass festival in Asheville, NC, it seemed like maybe 10% of the taps were pouring a Belgian style, and most of those were traditional wit bier/white beer. There was also only one (by my count) sour beer in the whole festival! We love sour/funky beers and we think there should be a lot more of them. So clearly, there’s a lot of room here.

One thing we really like about Belgian-style beer is that there really are no rules and no limit to the crazy stuff you can do with them. Barrel aging, wild fermentation, blending, herbs, spices, fruits, vegetables – bring it on! Another thing that we’ve noticed is that Belgian styles seem to be very accessible to people who think they “don’t like beer,” especially wine drinkers. There’s nothing better than giving a saison or a tripel to a Chardonnay drinker and watching their face light up after the first sip. Belgian style beers also go very well with food, and with the proper glassware they look great on the table too.

So there you have it. To sum up, here’s what you can expect from Westbrook Brewing: world-class quality beers, generally in the Belgian category, that are interesting, creative, and exciting.

Hi!

Welcome to the Westbrook Brewing blog! We're a new microbrewery based in Charleston, SC.  Since we don't have a definite location nailed down yet, it's probably going to be about a year before we can start making beer. In the meantime, follow our progress here. Topics for future posts might include:

• How we became so obsessed with beer that we just had to start a brewery
• What types of beers we'll probably make
• Hunting for brewery equipment
• Brewery construction/buildout updates
• Random thoughts on anything beer related

So, thanks for being interested in the newest SC brewery. Hope you're excited about it. We are!