Floodland Brewing

jpbebeau · Jul 11, 2017

I've been keeping an eye on this project for a while now, including taking some photos for the brewery, and since today is the first time there's been an email from the mailing list, I figure it's a decent time to start up a thread.

For those who haven't been following closely, Adam helped start up Holy Mountain and then set out on his own to be even more focused on his vision. All barrel-fermented/aged saisons, etc. A bottle club.

There are a couple articles out there that give decent background:

Seattle Met
Eater Seattle

If you haven't visited the Floodland website and signed up for the mailing list, you really should.

Forgive the long quote that follows, but I think this covers all the details pretty well:

This is the inaugural Floodland mailing list letter. My hope and plan is to use the mailing list for Floodland as a way to share what's going on at the brewery in lieu of a blog or facebook posts.

First, thanks for the interest in what I'm doing, it has been a lot of fun starting this project, and I'm excited for the barrels to mature and to get beer into bottles this summer.

Before I get into telling too many stories about making beer, I'm going to drop a lot of details about the bottle club. You'll see that it resembles a lot of other wine and beer bottle clubs if you're familiar with them. I've also put together an FAQ that attempts to answer a lot of likely questions. The bottle club membership isn't open yet. I'm sending this so you can take the time to read it, and if you have questions, you can drop me a line.

A lot of folks know the beers I've made, and a lot of folks don't. I wrestled with whether to do a bottle club before I had released beer. It seemed like it would scare folks who didn't know what to expect, which is entirely reasonable. To combat that I've tried to make the price really reasonable, and I expect that there will be perks available to members beyond what I'm promising below.

I will send another email in a few weeks when I'm ready to sign folks up.

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We are ready to open the inaugural membership rolls for Floodland Oakworks, the Floodland Brewing cellar community. Membership in 2018 Oakworks will include bottles available from as early as November 2017 through October 2018. Membership cost is $200 plus tax.

Floodland Oakworks community membership includes the following:

Ten 750ml bottles released throughout the membership period. Most of these beers will be available only to members.

Two pieces of glassware only available to 2018 members.

First opportunity to purchase most beers. For most releases members will receive an email and will be given a week to purchase their allotment.

Floodland will cellar Oakworks membership bottles, as well as any additional bottles purchased by members, for up to 3 months from the time of release.

Access to large format bottle releases (magnums and other large formats will be available to members via lottery).

Access to attend private tastings/tours by appointment at the barrel facility.

Caveats:

We ask that you don’t resell your bottles. We will revoke your right to purchase additional beer, and you will give up the right to membership in future years if we find you profiting from/reselling our beer and your membership will be cancelled without refund.

All prices are tax exclusive. Memberships are not transferrable, and all sales are final.

In the unfortunate event that memberships sell out before you are able to purchase one, please email [email protected] with 'Well This Sure Sucks' in the subject and let us know your full name and we will put you on the waiting list.

The rest of this is rather lengthy, but we are into details. If you have other questions, please direct them to [email protected].

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Questions and answers:

What Beers Do I Get?

Floodland beers are brewed seasonally, and undergo long and slow fermentation in oak with mixed cultures (ie: multi strain cultures or spontaneous/native cultures). The 10 bottles included in the membership will probably be 2 each of 5 different beers, depending on our yields, which will include a few saison-ish beers and several fruited beers. Most or all of those will be exclusive to members.

Are You a Sour Beer Brewery? Are You a Farmhouse Brewery?

We have used the term “mixed culture” a lot to describe our beers in the past because we’re not just using single strain, lab isolated yeast. We also do not have a single “house culture” and instead work with a variety of strains and cultures so that we can create beers with varying fermentation characters.

A large part of our barrel stock is fermented with a wild culture which was taken from a “spontaneous” fermentation on a Seattle porch in early 2016 and then repitched into barrels starting in 2017 without being lab isolated or banked. We also have a more yeast-forward mixed culture which was taken from a variety of appropriated strains which were mostly harvested and propagated in house. We believe this culture started with four primary saccharomyces yeast strains from farmhouse/saison origins, and several Brettanomyces strains.

Many of our saisons spend time in our open oak tank. In this tank the beer undergoes a primary fermentation completely open to the air in the barrel cellar, which allows for ambient/native yeast and bacteria to make their way into the culture as well. We in some cases temper and inhibit the production of acid in our beers with heavy hopping, which was always the tradition in English and Belgian beers prior the advent of sterile tanks and cultured yeast isolates. So although we use cultures that include bacteria, in this case “mixed culture” is a literal way to describe our fermentation, not always a euphemism for “sour.” All of that said, many of our beers are acidic to some degree.

We brew in a somewhat rustic manner with no refrigeration, and all of our beers are refermented and conditioned in the bottle and keg as opposed to being force carbonated. Bottle conditioning is a lengthy process for our beers, but we believe that it is worth the effort and patience. That final refermentation in the bottle adds a lot of character to the beer and extends the ability of the beer to age gracefully. Additionally, we use only whole fruit for our fruit refermentations, which we source from local farms. At Floodland we enjoy dry, pale, and well conditioned beers with balanced acidity, and we brew what we like to drink.

What Other Beers Do I Get?

If you've read this far you deserve a bit more detail. The photo at the top of this email is a sample of a mixed culture beer I'm thinking about calling 'City of Fire.' It was a blend of two white wine barrels which is currently just four days into refermentation on top of a huge amount of organic red and gold raspberries grown in Washington. It'll be a member only beer when it is ready. The base beer was brewed with pilsner malt and raw spelt, hopped with aged hops, and fermented with some mixed cultures. It tastes pretty good.

Our goal is to make as many releases as possible available to members directly, although it is likely that with a few occasional releases that will not be practical due to release quantities or other obligations. If releases included in the membership have additional bottles available, and when we release other beers, members will be notified a week before the public via email and given the opportunity to purchase and have those beers held alongside membership bottles at Floodland. We anticipate that around ten beers will be made available *in addition to* those included in the membership, some of which will be fruited and/or acidic beers.

What About Spontaneous/Coolship Beers?

Although we have a coolship and will be putting spontaneous/native fermentation beers into barrels in 2017, none will be packaged for inclusion in 2018 membership. That said, many bottles will include beer brewed with our wild culture, which was taken from spontaneous fermentation which captured native Washington yeast and bacteria. Future memberships will include beers utilizing our coolship.

Are You Raising Money To Start Floodland?

No. We have a 5,000 square foot warehouse/barrel cave in Fremont and we are fully licensed and have beer in barrels. We have a background as professional brewers with a solid track record of delivering on what we promise. We are not using a bottle club in order to finance our operation, and we will not rush beers. The beers aren’t ready yet but we have a pretty accurate timeline for them. We are doing this because we WANT to have a bottle club, which leads us to...

Why A Bottle Club?

There are two significant motivating factors in creating Oakworks from the outset. The first is to facilitate a community of people who we can have a chance to interact with personally — to have you be able to come into the barrel cellar and ask questions and talk to us about the beer. The second factor is that this is how we would want to buy beer from a small local producer. Floodland is motivated entirely by the desire to brew the beers we are the most passionate about and to share them in a way that aligns with our preferences. A bottle club is probably more time consuming for us than bottle releases on a single day, but we hope it also means that folks who join the club at the outset will spend more time enjoying the beer and less time worried about missing out on small run releases, which is a way of life that we can get behind. Because a lot of the beers will be exclusive, we need to have the club set up before those beers go into bottles so that we know how much to package, hence starting the club now rather than once we have beer out in the market.

2018=2017/2018

We’ll probably have 2018 Oakworks bottles at the end of 2017. We know this doesn’t make a ton of intuitive sense. Because our brewing season is based in part on the summer fruit harvest, our membership year does not strictly adhere to the calendar year. After the 2017 fruit season’s beers are aged and conditioned, we will begin tasting bottles to ensure that they are ready for release, with the intent that bottles will be aged for at least several months until they are ready to be consumed. Our bottle conditioning is usually 3-6 months. This lengthy aging and conditioning process means that July fruit beers will be ready no earlier than November, and many of the latter ripening fruit of the 2017 season will be ready after the calendar year has passed.

How Many Oakworks Memberships?

We don’t know yet. Making beer the way we do means we’ll produce a relatively small amount of beer, and we’d like people to be able to get multiples of all bottles, so we’ll need to cap membership. Because we want to provide some special bottles that are only available to members we will work to match membership size to expected blending and packaging sizes. We expect that the majority of runs of bottles of beers we referement on fruit will be 300-400 bottles.

Trustees/Proxies

Members will be able to pick up bottles and merchandise for other members. We want to make pickup as easy as possible, and we must balance that with having a very small staff. Please allow for at least a week notice via email before designating another member to pick up for you.

Bottle Pickups

We will provide more details on bottle pickup processes in the near future, we are still working out our process and the truth is that we want to be able to update and change our process as time goes on to make everyone happy. Our goal is to have available hours where members can schedule pickups. Members will also have access to sign up for private tours and tastings where you can pay for a flight of new things we are working on, check out the brewery, and pick up bottles at the same time.

First Access to 2019 Oakworks

First access will be given to existing members as soon as the 2019 membership is open. Whether or not next year’s membership numbers grow beyond the first year is TBD. If you are a huge pain in our ass we reserve the right to ask you to not renew your membership.

Can You Ship My Beers?

Unlike Washington wineries, we are not legally allowed to ship beers to you. If you would like us to be able to ship to you, please write your local State Congressional representatives and ask them where they stand on the issue. http://app.leg.wa.gov/DistrictFinder/

Can I Share My Membership?

To help avoid extra work on our end we ask that you put one name on the membership application. Due to our being a small operation we will direct all communication to the listed member and that person (or another designated member) must be present for pickups. How you split up bottles beyond that is entirely up to you. We have provided a 3 month pickup window and the ability to have members pick up for one another to help make things as convenient as possible for members.
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Disclosure: I met Adam when Holy Mountain was first starting up and he was always super personable and willing to talk about his beer. He's also asked me to take some photos from time to time, but I'm mainly just a fan.

Can't wait to taste the beers!

WA_Brian · Jul 11, 2017

I've been following this closely and am greatly looking forward to trying some beer. I'm also excited about the bottle club, since for me it's the ultimate low-stress way to buy beer. No lines, no stress, just casually go pick up the beer and have a chat with the brewer.

That being said, if that bottle club fills up with whale hunters on the other side of the country begging for proxies I'm going to be furious.

drone · Jul 11, 2017

I'll echo the excitement mentioned above, but I'm expecting the bottle club to fill up extremely fast. He mentioned the fruited releases would see 300-400 bottles produced, meaning he'll likely open up 150-200 memberships. Tiny.

distantmantra · Jul 11, 2017

WA_Brian said: ↑

I've been following this closely and am greatly looking forward to trying some beer. I'm also excited about the bottle club, since for me it's the ultimate low-stress way to buy beer. No lines, no stress, just casually go pick up the beer and have a chat with the brewer.

That being said, if that bottle club fills up with whale hunters on the other side of the country begging for proxies I'm going to be furious.
Click to expand...

I've politely harassed Adam enough over social media and in person about not getting shut out to the point where I wasn't worried, but now you gotta go and make me worried again. ;-)

jpbebeau · Jul 11, 2017

It does seem like a small membership/bottle count, but do you really think that 200 slots will fill up that quickly? I mean, he helped at Holy Mountain but I'm not sure the hype level is across the country...yet.

Aside from a few small articles in the local press, there hasn't been much said; I'm not sure too many non-locals even know of Floodland's existence. For my small part in changing that, I apologize.

If we can sign up soon, there might not be a huge rush.
#wishfulthinking

WA_Brian · Jul 11, 2017

drone said: ↑

....he'll likely open up 150-200 memberships.
Click to expand...

There are 327 Instagram followers. Oh no! Everybody panic!

drone · Jul 11, 2017

WA_Brian said: ↑

There are 327 Instagram followers. Oh no! Everybody panic!
Click to expand...

I dunno if that's a great indicator of how fast it'll fill up, but it's also possible I'm over estimating the speed in which whale hunters will pounce. Recent Holy Mountain releases may have clouded my vision

ewendel · Jul 11, 2017

Keeping my fingers-crossed that memberships will only be available for purchase in-person. I'm enraged enough seeing posts on Facebook about people on the opposite coast wanting to join. If you like PNW beers so damn much, fuggin' move here.

Irrespective of all that, very much looking forward to trying some of these Floodland brews!

ExVashonGujy · Jul 12, 2017

ewendel said: ↑

If you like PNW beers so damn much, fuggin' move here.
Click to expand...

NO, NO, NO, NO. Send them the beer. Keep them the hell out. We're overwhelmed with too many folks already.

In honor of Emmett Watson, longtime beer drinker, founder of KBO.

paysse · Jul 12, 2017

Yo, this is Adam from Floodland. Just wanted to say that I have fairly intentionally tried to keep things with Floodland on the DL so that local folks who followed what I've done in the past don't get left out. I am only going to keep sign-ups open for a few weeks when they do open, so that I can make some decisions about packaging counts for beers that will be just for members.

Sign ups won't be in person, they'll be online. I'll buy you a beer if I'm wrong, but I don't think in person will be necessary. No full proxies/trustees, just members picking up for other members. Although I know a lot of local folks are bummed about bottle release lines and that things with a lot of rare local beers are at a fever pitch, remember that it took a while for any of the coveted breweries to build to that. I held off doing a press release or talking about my beers very much until well after there were lots of barrels filled to avoid hype mongering.

I know that signing up for a bottle club early may seem risky, but unlike some places that have disappointed or seen gnarly delays, Floodland is a licensed brewery with beer in barrels (and beer in bottles, and beer refermenting on fruit...) and I'm a professional brewer who has done this before.

I see opening the club now as a way of making things more chill. I want it to be easy for local folks to get in on it rather than after bottles start circulating and words gets out, when I know there is a good chance that out of state folks would swarm.

Also, it's just beer. If you're too stressed about it stop by Floodland and I'll get you stoned and we can drink some Cuvee de Jonquiles.

John_M · Jul 12, 2017

[QUOTE="paysse, post: 5539391, member: 330371]
Also, it's just beer. If you're too stressed about it stop by Floodland and I'll get you stoned and we can drink some Cuvee de Jonquiles.[/QUOTE]

Until today, I'd never heard of these guys. Even now I don't know a thing about them, but with an attitude like this, how can you not be a fan?

drone · Jul 12, 2017

paysse said: ↑

Yo, this is Adam from Floodland. Just wanted to say that I have fairly intentionally tried to keep things with Floodland on the DL so that local folks who followed what I've done in the past don't get left out. I am only going to keep sign-ups open for a few weeks when they do open, so that I can make some decisions about packaging counts for beers that will be just for members.

Sign ups won't be in person, they'll be online. I'll buy you a beer if I'm wrong, but I don't think in person will be necessary. No full proxies/trustees, just members picking up for other members. Although I know a lot of local folks are bummed about bottle release lines and that things with a lot of rare local beers are at a fever pitch, remember that it took a while for any of the coveted breweries to build to that. I held off doing a press release or talking about my beers very much until well after there were lots of barrels filled to avoid hype mongering.

I know that signing up for a bottle club early may seem risky, but unlike some places that have disappointed or seen gnarly delays, Floodland is a licensed brewery with beer in barrels (and beer in bottles, and beer refermenting on fruit...) and I'm a professional brewer who has done this before.

I see opening the club now as a way of making things more chill. I want it to be easy for local folks to get in on it rather than after bottles start circulating and words gets out, when I know there is a good chance that out of state folks would swarm.

Also, it's just beer. If you're too stressed about it stop by Floodland and I'll get you stoned and we can drink some Cuvee de Jonquiles.
Click to expand...

Really appreciate you taking the time to drop this note, it means a lot. Looking forward to trying out some of the beers!

vurt · Jul 12, 2017

I'm already a fan because of their attitude and because "Floodland" is a great album. (Hey, we all have history.)

BBThunderbolt · Jul 12, 2017

paysse said: ↑

Also, it's just beer. If you're too stressed about it stop by Floodland and I'll get you stoned and we can drink some Cuvee de Jonquiles.
Click to expand...

Well, what about those of us who are so stressed over a brewery (that we hadn't heard of til this thread), but don't smoke? Can we just come by and taste (Ya know, at OUR convenience)?

Seriously though, thanks for the interaction. I've often said that breweries can do no right, in the eyes of the fanboys. Good luck to ya, and, I look forward to trying your beers.

chinochino · Jul 12, 2017

vurt said: ↑

I'm already a fan because of their attitude and because "Floodland" is a great album. (Hey, we all have history.)
Click to expand...

I played the heck out of this back in the day. Still do if some unfortunate soul knocks on my door and want to 'save' me. Reign in Blood is just not subtle enough

kingsleyr · Jul 12, 2017

paysse said: ↑

Also, it's just beer. If you're too stressed about it stop by Floodland and I'll get you stoned and we can drink some Cuvee de Jonquiles.
Click to expand...

Can I just do that anyway without the stress? I'll bring something like a avec les bons voeux.

ewendel · Jul 12, 2017

Really appreciate the reply, @paysse. Was curious if you've chatted w/ Art of the Table at all about having bottles available for on-site consumption at the restaurant? I don't do wine, so I often lament that great restaurants in the area don't offer much in the way of great beer selection. (It's my understanding that your brewing space is underground in the same building as the new AotT spot, that's why I mention it.) Anyway, just a thought. Let's share some beers!

distantmantra · Jul 12, 2017

AoT had a pretty decent beer list last time I was there, particularly for a restaurant of it's reputation/pricing structure. Not like a certain restaurant next to the Aurora Bridge who just stocks up on random European beers...

Altura also has a great beer list, for those looking at fine dining options.

sox203 · Jul 12, 2017

+1 for Altura, my favorite restaurant in the city.

distantmantra said: ↑

AoT had a pretty decent beer list last time I was there, particularly for a restaurant of it's reputation/pricing structure. Not like a certain restaurant next to the Aurora Bridge who just stocks up on random European beers...

Altura also has a great beer list, for those looking at fine dining options.
Click to expand...

sox203 · Jul 12, 2017

paysse said: ↑

Also, it's just beer. If you're too stressed about it stop by Floodland and I'll get you stoned and we can drink some Cuvee de Jonquiles.
Click to expand...

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