There’s a lot of talk, as we prepare for the new year, about how rough things are in the economy.

Rough? We didn’t know any better. The country has been in recession for a year, and Uncommon Brewers only started sales in June, so it’s been all uphill as far as we’ve been concerned.

On that note, keep an eye on this space (blog?), for news about a retail deal. One of our beers, the Siamese Twin Ale, may be a lot easier to find starting in 2009.

And as the new year starts, we’ve sent one of our brewers, Matt, to Sacramento. We’re barely out of the starting gate and our team is already being poached. He is, of course, brewing on a beautiful system several decades more advanced than ours, and we hope that he remembers what it was like to live in fear of our chiller.

The outlook for the coming year is good. We’re going to be brewing like mad, and bringing some really fun beers to market. Bacon, anyone?

-Uncommon Brewers

Every week or two we get someone who says, “What’s up with your website? It hasn’t been updated in months!”

Guilty as charged.

We’ve been busy, winning awards and undergoing a minor expansion.

What awards? Well back in October we took first place in the National Organic Brewing Challenge, sponsored by Seven Bridges Cooperative with our Siamese Twin Ale.

Not about to rest on our laurels, or druthers, or much of anything else, we’re just about to push a new beer out the door. The Baltic Porter is styled after a traditional British export porter, but brewed in the uncommon manner with an addition of star anise and black licorice. It will be available on draft just as soon as our keg rings arrive.

We’ve expanded our fermentation capacity with four brand new 15bbl conicals from Stromberg Tanks.

And we also now know how to rebuild a plate chiller. After two weeks of work the new chiller was up and running flawlessly in time for last week’s batch of the Golden State Ale.

Distribution remains pretty damn limited, although we’re working on that. We have a sales representative joining the team and expect to be expanding beyond our footholds in Santa Cruz and San Francisco as the new year dawns.

As always, if you want to see Uncommon Brewers in your neighborhood, or in your business, drop us a tip through this website.

Cheers,
Uncommon Brewers

Another 11-hour day wore us down, but the beer flows on.

We packaged up another two batches into cans and kegs beginning in the early hours of Thursday morning. The two batches were blended, as typical for the Siamese Twin Ale and true to the Belgian styles. This was our most aggressive blend to date, featuring one batch that was left to age and develop since October of 2007, and one produced earlier this month.

Below: Reed checks lid seams while Matt and Joel inspect.

Check out Head Brewer Alec’s appearance on West Coast Live with host Sedge Thomson early Saturday morning on the 13th of September. The live show begins at 10am.

It’s been a busy few weeks around the brewery, but we’ve made the time to get our beer into a few more locations.

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.

Many thanks to all of the bars and restaurants that have welcomed us in the last week as we’ve begun offering samples and initial distribution.

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.

Looking back through the posts on the site, there were many points where we believed that we’d be sending beer out the door at any minute. We were wrong often enough that it’s a little too painful to count them all.

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.

Despite our best efforts, we’ve actually managed to sell our first keg of beer.

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

It’s now 6:30pm, just past the 12 hour mark of our day.

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.

“Where’s the beer?”

“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.