The Golden State Ale is on tap at Mondo in Sonoma, the 515 Kitchen, and their sister The Red Lounge.

We haven’t checked in with them in a few weeks, but The Bistro in Hayward also has a keg of the Golden, which may be tapped at any time.

Our Siamese Twin Ale is on tap at the Wine Exchange of Sonoma, the The Red Lounge in Santa Cruz, Mission Pizza in Fremont, and we’ve recently added The Crepe Place to our growing list.

We’re currently sitting on the “Past Beer” list at The Trappist, but hope to be back into their impressive rotation in the coming months.

Our retail presence remains limited, but cans of the Twin can be found at the River St. Cafe & Cheese Shop, and the New Leaf Market in nearby Felton. We’re going to be expanding that retail presence in the coming weeks.

We’ll add to the list as it grows, but for now our beer is available at the following locations.

The 515 Kitchen, and the River St. Cafe & Cheese Shop in Santa Cruz.

We have word that the Golden State Ale can currently be found at The Red Lounge on their weekend side bar taps.

The Bistro in Hayward.

Mondo in Sonoma

More to follow as the orders come in.

Update:

We’re happy to add The Trappist to our list. Brothers Chuck and Aaron have a few kegs of our Siamese Twin Ale that’ll be going on tap in the coming days.

Cheers.

Fortunately that’s in the past. We are officially open for business. If you’re a bar or restaurant owner interested in buying our beers, or want to arrange for a taste, there’s a new contact page conveniently placed on the sidebar over in that direction —->.

Direct sales to consumers will begin in the next few weeks. For reasons of sanity and sanitation our facility is not open to the general public.

With that out of the way we have two beers ready for market.

Our Golden State Ale is a Belgian-style golden ale, brewed in homage to our home state with toasted poppy seeds. It’s our quaffable summer beer, light on the palate with a crisp poppy zing to finish. 6.4% ABV

A little heavier on the palate is our Siamese Twin Ale. This is a Belgian-style double brewed with a traditional coriander, and an uncommon addition of kaffir lime and lemongrass. An amber body, rich, flavorful, absolutely delicious, and entirely too drinkable for a beer that’s 8.5% ABV.

A single keg of the Golden State Ale will be on tap down at the Red, just a block from Pacific Avenue in Santa Cruz, starting sometime in the next few days.

Look for the bamboo tap handle with our signature pith helmet tacked to the side, or ask for Uncommon Brewers by name.

cheers,
Skot and Alec
Uncommon Brewers

Skot is bleeding, and I (Alec) have sustained hot wort burns on both arms, making it a brew day like any other.

It’s been a few days (weeks?), since the last post, so an update is due to our surprisingly numerous readers.

A the moment there’s a batch of the Baltic Porter cooling in our travesty of a wort chiller. Yesterday’s Baltic is about to meet its yeast.

Two early experimental batches, including our Sinister Twin Ale, are racked in anticipation of playing around with our keg filler next week. They’ll be held at the brewery for in-house reference.

A number of other batches are mid-process, waiting for…

The 12 barrels of the Golden State Ale in our brite tank. The beer’s delicious, but there’s still no carbonation. A recently purchased chiller (used), sold in “excellent condition”, arrived in what did indeed appear to be excellent condition… until we took the cover off. A warranty claim is in process, because the common definition of “excellent condition” does not include “stripped for useful parts”.

No chilling unit means no effectively force-carbonated beer, so we’re moving up the schedule for something a little more interesting. Our disposable kegs, Keykegs from Lightweight Containers in the Netherlands, give us the freedom to keg-condition our beers.

We’ll be the first brewery in the United States using these kegs, and we’re very excited about the prospect. More information about the Keykegs, and why we think that they’re one of the greatest recent innovations in brewing, to come in a future post.

So faced with a choice between having a chiller up and running sometime in the near future, or kegs of the Golden State Ale available in two weeks, we’ve chosen the path that offers us a predictable delivery date for our first beer to market.

Mark your calendars for two weeks from Tuesday.

“When can we buy some beer?”

“You guys really do make beer, right?”

Questions like these are all too common these days. Despite our efforts there is no beer ready for sale yet.

There are three ways of doing things: The right way, the wrong way, and the Uncommon Brewers way– which looks exactly like the wrong way, but works for some combination of luck and sheer willpower.

Unfortunately we can’t will carbonation into warm beer. A misconfiguration of our brite tank lead to a rapid and unfortunate depressurizing of our first batch headed to market. The Uncommon Brewers way of carbonating does work, but far too slowly to be realistic. We’re picking up a chilling unit and starting over again with the carbonations the right way.

The loud booming that you hear is the sound of two brewers banging their heads against a brite tank.

It’s not a fast process. Just two cans are filled at a time. There are some long days of slowly passing cans along the line in our future. The results, we believe, are well worth it.

We’ll be releasing a few cases onto the market as samples of what’s to come. Check back for details about where to find them in the greater Bay Area.

So here it is, updated.

There will be no more running in circles. We no longer have the room to run in circles. There are 124,000 cans in our way, stacked floor to ceiling through much of the downstairs area. That’s twenty pallets, each stacked nine feet high.

The mind boggles.

The first cans will be filled on Tuesday. We’ll be selling our Siamese Twin Ale in both cans and kegs by midweek. Check back in for details on where you can find our first public batch.

Tighten fittings before they’re attached under the tank with less than an inch of clearance between the fermenter and shards of stainless steel on concrete. Just saying.

Our first run of cans is expected to roll off the line next week.

And our kegs, our brilliant, innovative, revolutionary, and unique in the United States, our KeyKegs, are to be loaded into a shipping container… by hand… in the Netherlands… for their journey across the sea, through T.R.’s canal, and up the coast to us, as soon as Monday.

We’ll have cans on the market, and available for sale at locations to be announced in the Bay Area, within the next two weeks.

Kegs, the boring old aluminum kind, will be available at the same time.

That last post in December turned out to be highly optimistic. We’re anticipating having keg rings for the Twin approved in early March, with many kegs immediately headed out the door to several local bars and restaurants.

In-house sampling of our preliminary batches is showing that the years of work in recipe development have paid off. This stuff is delicious! We can’t wait to start offering it to the public.