Up and Running

We received the last of our permits on Fri (7/20) and brewed the first batches of beer on the Saturday and Sunday, which transformed us from a warehouse with a ton of stainless steel and a lot of debt to an actual functioning brewery!

For the 1^st batches we decided to brew Naysayer Pale Ale. Naysayer is going to skirt the line between American Pale Ale and a West Coast IPA. It will have a nice pungent hoppiness that you’d find in an IPA, but 5.2% abv and only 35 IBUs like a drinkable Pale Ale. I don’t really care for guidelines, though, so I really don’t care what “style” it fits into as long as it tastes good. The reason we chose it as our first batch is that it has a relatively low starting gravity of 12.6°Plato, which makes it an ideal beer to generate yeast for the rest of our beers.

Unfortunately, I can’t say that the first brew went all that smoothly, but it did in fact get the beer in the tank. The first brew on Saturday, we ran into hiccups with just about every piece of equipment we used, which resulted in a 14+ hr day for me and an overnight “campout” at the brewery for my dad so that he could make sure the glycol chiller worked properly. Day two went much, much better. Everything worked as it should, I was able to hit all my specs, and I was in and out of the brewery in half the time that Saturday took. The end result – my current soundtrack for writing this blog is the bubbling of the fermenter as it happily turns sugar into alcohol and the gentle hum of pumps and compressors working exactly as they should.

Later in the week we get back to brewing with more Naysayer as well as our Beanhead Coffee Porter, followed next week by a Bourbon barrel aged barleywine called Dog’s Bollocks.

Drinking fresh Rushing Duck beer is right around the corner!

P.S Help us reach our goal of $10,000 on Kickstarter to start our barrel aging program at http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1513672390/barrel-aging-at-rushing-duck-brewing-company! Thanks!