The hot new thing in craft beer? Good old-fashioned lager

shocked a good word, too. I couldn't believe I was looking at the whole thing when the head brewer showed me around.

 

Amen!

And when you come back to visit you have Sly Fox, Neshaminy Creek, Sterling Pig, Workhorse, Root Down, East End, Iron Hill, 2SP, Mainstay,...

Unfortunately Stoudts is no longer on the list.

Cheers!

 

The two biggest factors, in my experience, for lease price are square footage and location. The height of the ceilings has never been mentioned in any of my negotiations.

It was a rhetorical question, but in my opinion, if your beer is no better than your competitors in the area and you charge a higher price for your beer and you justify it by saying "sorry, we're less efficient than the guys up the street." you won't get sales for long, like you mentioned with customer support. Similar to how I saw recently a brewery had announced a $15 bottle price for a barrel aged beer and one of the barrels ended up being a dumper, so they bumped the bottle price to $25 to recoup some of those costs. I think that's ridiculous to ask of your customers. You set up properly or you take a hit on the margins, but don't screw up and charge your customers more to account for it.

 

Well...

In my area it seems like customers place great value on what they perceive to be 'superior' breweries. For example, Tired Hands is perceived to be a 'superior' brewery mostly for the Juicy/Hazy IPA, Milkshake IPAs, etc. Tired Hands also produced high quality lagers (Helles, Pilsner, Schwarzbier,...). The 'good news' is they price the 4-pack (16 ounce cans) of the lagers at a cheaper price ($14-15) than their IPAs. The 'bad news' is that other locally produced high quality lagers are available for significantly less (e.g., 10 bucks a 6-pack). I have consumed many cans of Tired Hands lagers since I am good friends of one of the investors and I get them free but I personally would not pay those prices for these lagers (despite their high quality). Needless to say there are many Tired Hands customers who are 'happy' to pay 15 bucks for these 4-packs. Maybe they consider them a 'good deal' since they are cheaper than the other Tired Hands brands ($18, 20 and even higher)?

Cheers!

 

Not much to show, you can stand in the middle of the room and do a 360 and see about all of it except the bottling room and where they load stuff up. The art gallery idea is sheer opulence, have to say that I don’t get, but we’ll see there, and I bet there’s more space there than in production.

 

That’s not right you eat the loss there, imagine the hit BC took on those infected batches. I wouldn’t buy another beer from them, the customer doesn’t deserve to pay for your mistake or bad luck, and BA beer comes with obvious risks.

 

I’d be interested to know why Red Oak lagers their beers for so long. Don’t know squat about the process, but it’s not an advertising gimmick, I’ve never seen or heard an ad here from Red Oak at all, let alone mentioning this. Their sign usually says real beer or fresh beer is best, it might mention, water/ hops/ barley/malt that’s it. Other than that if they advertise I missed it, and they make great beers. If they brew 23K barrels in that tiny production area they surely aren’t into rushing the process to make a buck. And as honkey mentioned there are scientific ways to reduce lagering times without affecting quality. And money isn’t it.

 

not to enter the fray here, but we lager for 9 weeks bc we feel the (weihenstephaner) yeast we use turns a major corner in our horizontal tanks at that point. granted this has to do with natural clarifying -- and a number of other factors -- but we are convinced these things make a difference.

 

fwiw, I find certain other lager strains need only 5 weeks to turn all the corners they are going to turn (regardless of tank geometry). but that's maybe a discussion for another time/thread.

EDIT: anyone's free to stop by and taste for themselves how the beers are at 5 vs 9 weeks.

 

Just back to report on how I did with my random snag of some Hofbrau Original. It was definitely drinkable, but also right on the edge of not being so. There were trace amounts of light-struck skunk, cabbagey DMS, and the malt had a bit of a tired quality. Balance was off, too, as a result, with the bitterness seeming to stand out. It surely won't be good even a month from now. Was it better a month ago? Perhaps, but my gut tells me that this isn't a 6 month bottle, and I got unlucky this time.

And here's the code:

L 042 S, which seems to be the 42nd day of 2019, or damn near a year on the dot. Coincidentally, this is exactly the age of a bottle I would have chosen to experiment with, if I was doing it that way. If their pull date is a year out, then this seems to be exactly the sort of beer you'd expect, still drinkable but not at its best. And I wouldn't expect to see these signs at 6 months or so.

@zid

 

Any clue why Red Oak Lagering times are 8-10 weeks? Clarifying, maybe the house yeast? I’ve been on the tour with my dad, but I’ve never seen him in the bar area. He studied more than likely at the same place honkey did, born, lived and brewed there for 10 years, curious about the different approach.

 

I think he did the full 4+ years at the TU Muenchen. They may go 8-10 weeks for clarifying purposes (I don't think they filter)?

 

No it’s unfiltered.

 

yeah, if we used, say, the Ayinger strain (which I just learned may be traceable to a Tuborg vs a Carlsberg "strain"), then in my experience 5 weeks would be plenty (provided filtration/fining can be performed properly). with the weihenstephaner strain, I definitely find that the 9-week threshold stands and makes a BIG difference for us

 

Ha, a Ft Jackson commando.

 

You should have seen the first incarnation of the Sprecher Brewery, it was tiny. Here's the mash tun, that's the boil kettle and over there are the lagering tanks -- have a beer.

The tour was basically standing in one spot and turning to look where the guide pointed.

 

That's the proper lagering time for the likes of you.