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Get by with a little help from your friends.
As most of you are aware, our brewery model is built following in the footsteps of breweries such and The Rare Barrel and Casey Brewing and Blending, using another brewery to contract our wort. We had announced that New English was going to do our wort. However, in great news for them, but unfortunate news for us, by the time our permits came through they were too busy to fulfill our needs. We were left to reach out to the many other breweries in San Diego for help.
To be honest, we thought with so many options it would be a bit easier to find a new brewery. However, the nature of the demand in San Diego for incredible craft beer leaves most of the breweries around here brewing at capacity all year round. We reached out to some friends and found out that with their recent purchase of Twisted Manzanita, Groundswell was entertaining contract offers. They had a new, pretty 30BBL system that they were willing to use to help some of the community.
After a small negotiating period, we had reached an agreement and set March 22nd for our first batch. The next task was scaling up our small batch recipe for their 30BBL system. Zach, the head brewer at Groundswell worked with us to order the grain and set up a brew time.
The brew day was exciting. Seeing a brewhouse of that size at work for the first time, and being around other professional brewers is a perk of contract brewing, which is not talked about much. Zach and their assistant brewer Brent, are incredibly knowledgeable. While they were showing us the system, it also presented a chance to bounce ideas off one another.
The first run went according to plan on the brewing side, however our transportation option fell through and a last-minute fix was needed. The quickest solution was to simply rent a truck from the Home Depot around the corner. It was not the most efficient solution as it only held one full tote at a time, and having three full totes, the trips took a while. (Something we would remedy next time) However, it was an all-around success as we filled 16 barrels of our first version of our sour base, and we were ready to go again….
To Be Continued!