The Rare Barrel Blog

San Francisco (Sour) Beer Week

While those of us who love sour beers may not experience an official “San Francisco Sour Beer Week” in the near future, I couldn’t miss out on San Francisco Beer Week, with a sour beer twist. 

Russian River Brew Pub | Any trip north of San Francisco, for someone who is starting an all-sour beer company, would not be complete without a visit to the Russian River Brew Pub. Their four sour beers (Supplication, Temptation, Consecration, and Sanctification) are like double rainbows: incredibly hard to find, and once spotted, create and uncontrollable amount of pleasure for those who experience them. Fortunately, there is no shortage of double rainbows in Santa Rosa, CA, as these incredibly complex, yet clean, sour beers are regularly served on tap for everyone to enjoy at their brew pub.  While Russian River Brewing is very well known for their sour beers, I wouldn’t be surprised if their pizzas have won some awards too.  

Lagunitas Brewing Company | Lagunitas fully embraces the mantra “work hard, play hard.” As a few hundred craft beer enthusiasts enjoy their Lagunitas IPAs while enjoying live music in the courtyard, a crew of Germans install their new 250-barrel brewhouse. While Lagunitas is best known for their hoppy ales, I was excited to try The Return of Ruben and the Bretts, their sour beer on tap. This sour beer is an imperial stout, aged in bourbon barrels with Brettanomyces. With aromas of bourbon and brown sugar, flavors of roasted malt, coffee, and dark fruit, the Brettanomyces adds pleasant a pleasant sour experience that balances out the sweetness of the stout. A special thanks to Jon for giving my family and I an incredible special tour of their brewery. 

Ale Industries | With a short trip over to Concord, on the eastern side of the San Francisco Bay area, I indulge in a sour beer with Morgan, the brewmaster and co-founder of Ale Industries. Ale Industries is currently brewing on a 15-barrel brewhouse, and with over 250% growth last year, they are pretty much at production capacity. While their flag ship beers focus around a sessionable IPA, a wheat beer, and a red ale, Ale Industries experiments with barrel ageing and sour beers. I was fortunate enough to try their Sour Cherry Stout, which clocks in at 11% alcohol by volume (ABV). The Sour Cherry Stout is a blend of two beers: Sour Stout (aged for 14 months in Cabernet barrels) and Nouyeux Kriek (aged for 36 months in zinfandel barrels with whole cherries).  The Sour Stout provides a great foundation for the beer, while the Nouyeux Kriek provides pleasant notes of cherries with hints of almonds. Keep an eye out for Ale Industries as they expand their distribution into San Diego and the northwest. 

Thank you, Bruery

A note from Jay:

Starting my brewing career at The Bruery was a dream come true. Even at six months old, The Bruery already had a reputation for using strange ingredients in strange styles. With Patrick Rue’s vision from his days of experimental homebrewing during his stint in law school and Tyler King’s like-minded passion for craft beer with professional expertise, The Bruery’s first employees had formed a powerful team. To join them was one of the luckiest moments of my life.

Now years later, The Bruery still has a reputation for pushing the envelop. However, now they have the accolades to back up these crazy ideas! Tyler has built a talented and passionate brewing team and Patrick has hand-picked brilliant minds to run the business. I couldn’t be more fortunate to have worked with such an amazing group of people. The Bruery took me in, treated me like family, and I’ll always be incredibly proud to say I worked there.

Today I give a heartfelt THANK YOU, from me to everyone at The Bruery. I would not be where I am today without you.

Press Release

The Beginning

The Beginning

Jay Goodwin has been lucky enough to work with some incredibly talented people over his three and a half years at The Bruery. A small craft brewer in Orange County, The Bruery has consistently produced high quality beers that challenge both the consumer and their brewers. 

In his time at The Bruery, Jay fell in love with the barrel-aged sours he produced such as Hottenroth Berliner Weisse, Oude Tart and Marron Acidife. The brewing team was lucky enough to win multiple medals for sour beer at both The Great American Beer Festival and The World Beer Cup.

He began to think how he could bring what he learned from brewing these styles back to where he and Alex (Co-founder) grew up: the San Francisco Bay Area.  While collaborating with Alex, his college roommate who introduced him to home brewing, and Jay’s father, a lifelong entrepreneur, the team drafted a plan to start a sour beer company back home, in The Bay.

The Idea

As Head of Barrel Aging at The Bruery, Jay started focusing on inoculation and management of the sour barrels. The brewers would send him wort and he had a whole warehouse full of barrels to play with. The idea was born there. Why not team up with breweries here at home in the Bay Area and start entire sour-only barrel warehouse to Northern California?

Since sour beers will take over 1 year to mature (a long time!), they are brewed less frequently due to limited fermentation space. Jay quickly realized that if they built their own brew house, it would collect probably a good amount of dust. Therefore, they decided to partner with host breweries in the Bay Area to produce our wort. While a host brewery will produce their wort, The Rare Barrel will manage fermentation, blending, packaging, and distribution. This model ultimately allows The Rare Barrel to maximize barrel aging capacity while supporting local craft breweries. It’s a win-win situation!

The Future

We can’t wait to get started! Since the sour beer production process takes longer than a typical ale or lager, we hope we can get started sooner rather than later. A few things that are very important to us include:

●     Focus - Since we are focusing on one type of product, sour beer, we believe we can concentrate on the specific challenges that these styles bring more than a brewery that splits time between non-sour and sour beer.

●     Community - We feel so honored and humbled that we have the opportunity to start a project like this. We’d love for homebrewers, craft beer connoisseurs, distributors, retailers and the beer media to get more involved in the production process with us!

●     Experimentation - Sour production can happen so many ways…we figure we will try them all! We will make a lot of this information available on our website so when you buy a bottle of our beer you will know everything about the blend, the barrels, the fermentation, the cellaring…everything!