Many thanks to the guys at Cask Systems for their help in getting us up and running. The canning system works flawlessly. More so, at least, than our slightly under-carbonated beer.

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.

Regular visitors to the website know that it’s updated infrequently at best. This is in no way a reflection of our interest in promoting ourselves. It’s just that we’re spending so much time running in circles down here at the brewery that we don’t really remember the Internet until someone emails us and says, “Update your damn blog.”

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.

On the word from our colleagues at the TTB that the Twin has been approved for sale, we’ve gone ahead and racked our first commercial batch into the carbonation and dispensing tank. As proper there were tears over spilt beer, and a hearty laugh at the almost-required blood sacrifice to the beer gods.

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.

We received notice in the mail yesterday that the can label for our Siamese Twin Ale has been approved.

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.

We’re working out the final details on the canning line and labels, but our applications are in process.

The expectation is that we’ll have kegs ready for market within the next few weeks, just in time for the New Years’ celebrations.

Get ready to see our highly distinctive tap handles at your favorite bars and restaurants around the Bay Area.

It’s been a little bit since our last post, but we’re definitely still alive. No steam wand related deaths, as of yet.

There are eight batches happily fermenting or aging. The plan calls for submitting the Twin and Baltic for label approval within the next week or two. The Golden is going to follow just as soon as we decide whether to run with our original recipe, or the delicious accident.

Brewing is on hold until we get a few batches packaged, and a few more fermenters cleaned up. Retapping several of them from an obsolete British thread has been an interesting experience.

Three tap handles later, one Grundy has eight of twelve bolt-holes rethreaded. Usually it’s the taps themselves that snap.

Thanks to everyone out there for their patience. There will be limited samples of our initial product line available next week based upon an invite-only basis. Please contact us if you’re going to be in the area.

What is this? Daylight? We’re done brewing, cleaned up, and reset for tomorrow? And it’s still light out?

Ten hours from start to finish, 7am to 5pm, with a glorious five-minute break for lunch. It’s like running a marathon, but with more risk of being scalded with 90psi steam.

Yes, it’s the day of our fourth batch and the pressure is off. We’ve finally had our first stuck mash.

The brewers reading this can sympathize. Everyone else should be glad that they can’t.

This is our second run of the Golden State Ale. It’s true to our original recipe this time, with a California Ale yeast instead of one of those wacky Belgian Trappist styles. More to follow.

The boiler is quiet and we’re pretty much packed up after our third commercial batch.

Better yet, it only took 13 hours this time. We’re learning, and improving, although the hands-on nature of our brew system means that we aren’t going to be able to shave off much more time without some equipment upgrades.

Or a brewery helper monkey. Anyone know where to get a helper monkey that’s trained to sanitize industrial hoses and stainless steel? We could really use one of those. If they come in pairs, all the better.

Speaking of pairs, today we ran the Twin, the Siamese Twin, and it was without a doubt our best effort to date. The flavor of the wort is bang-on accurate to the original formula. We overshot our concentration by a bit. The beer’s likely to be closer to 10% ABV than the intended 8.5%, but maybe it wants to be 10%.

Well… actually not likely. It, as well as our future customers, will be much happier diluted down to its intended strength. That and other adjustments will happen after primary fermentation is completed in four to five days.

More photos to come, once we figure out how to work the camera and brew at the same time. I’m thinking of growing extra arms.

These have been long days, but we have our first two commercial batches in fermentation. Whether they’re up to our standards for sale, or destined to become in-house reminders of lessons learned, will have to wait until secondary fermentation completes.

Much has been learned in the process. If any readers happen to have an extra plate chiller laying around, we’d be happy to clutter up our space with it.

Roughly three barrels of our initial Golden State Ale are in secondary, and five to six barrels of the Baltic Porter in primary.

Photos of the carnage to come.