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.

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.