Soooo... It's been four months since our last post!! I know we are seriously slacking on keeping you updated. Fortunately, we have a big following on Facebook and Twitter/ Instagram are on the rise and we have been updating them regularly.
What's been going on at Rushing Duck? Well we are distributing beer to bars and our tasting room is now open Saturdays 12-5p. Thanks to all of you our beer has been getting great reviews and has been selling. We are still only in the Hudson Valley and loving it!
We have four different beers now; Our Beanhead Coffee Porter (that won the Hudson Valley Beer Cup), Naysayer Pale Ale, Nimptopsical Ale, and our winter seasonal Ded Moroz Russian Imperial Stout. Dan is still the only one working full time at the brewery. He's been working extremely hard to make the best beer he possibly can. I have been doing the office work, which I love, and occasionally deliveries and keg cleaning. I've learned never to wear heels to the brewery or to sales meetings because I never know when I will be lugging a keg behind me.
We've have some coverage in the media that has helped us tremendously. The local newspaper and bloggers are getting the word out about Rushing Duck and we can not be more appreciative. We rely on social media and traditional media to get the work out because are marketing budget is still $0. We also thank you for liking and sharing our posts!
I think I've touched on all the big news, like being opened and all! What's next for RD? Barrel-aged beer!! Dan and I are really going to blog from now on, promise, maybe.
If you haven't already follow us @rushingduck on Twitter/ Instagram and at www.facebook/rushingduck.com
Nikki
Rushing Duck Brewing
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
Sunday, August 12, 2012
Almost There!!
Hey Everyone, It’s Nikki again! I just wanted to update you
on our progress over the past few weeks.
If you have been following us on Facebook you probably know that we have
been working our behinds off to get you beer. So here are some facts to keep
you 100% in the know:
1)
We are not opened to the public yet. We need to finish up our tasting room to look
all pretty for you to come relax and have some samples. We also have to get it inspected and, like
everything, this takes time.
2)
We are not a bar/ brewpub. We can give out samples to you, but we cannot
sell pints or food. Beer will be available
to go and we will update you on the bars that are carrying our beers! A
community board will be up in the brewery to allow you to find local places
that you can eat and have a few pints of RD beer :).
3)
We are draft only to start. No bottles just yet.
4)
We are not a big brewery. In time Rushing Duck plans on expanding; however,
in the immediate future we will remain small and only available in the Hudson
Valley. We like it here and have
experienced an overwhelming amount of support from our local community. Our intentions are to provide beer for our
local bars and shops and not overextend our distribution into markets that we
are not able to supply. The Hudson
Valley rocks!
Ok, enough with the boring stuff! Naysayer Pale Ale is
brewed and ready to walk out the door.
We are just waiting on some more approvals from the state and we can
finally be in bars. We will let you know
what’s going on! Thanks for the support.
Here is a sneak peek at our tasting room! --Nikki
Monday, July 23, 2012
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 1st 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!
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!
Friday, July 13, 2012
Nikki Gets to Blog!
Hey Everyone! I am Nikki the Pro Bono Sales Rep/ Day
Laborer/ Dan’s Moral Support/Whatever clever title that involves getting
Rushing Duck up and running. I don’t know why, but Dan gave me the freedom to
write on his blog to let you know what is going on with RD. If you feel like we have been slacking with
our social media and our blog, we have, and it’s not because we don’t love you,
appreciate your support or want to inform you of all the things we do, it is simply
because weeks are flying by and I am constantly losing track of time and Dan (who
works 12 hour days every day, gross). Here’s the update:
So, what’s been going on at Rushing Duck behind the scenes
of the enchanting peachy/ pink exterior walls of our building? I can tell you it is exciting!! Dan, Tony
(our engineer/slave), Les (Dan’s Dad/Chief) and I (every so often) have been getting
together the brewing side of RD so that we can start making that beer that we
want you to have so badly. It’s been
going great! In fact, Dan did a water brew to make sure we didn’t mess things
up too badly on that side and it was successful. Wednesday July 11, 2012 was the first time
any of us felt somewhat relaxed in a long time.
Anyway, there is still work to do in the tasting room. If you happened to have walked in (We are not
open yet) in the last couple weeks you probably saw us sweating profusely and
building a room for you to hang out in or saw me falling through the ceiling
(yes, that happened). The tasting room will
be open as soon as we have beer for you to drink.
As you read above, I am not the ideal construction worker and
tend to think breaking stuff is more fun than building stuff (you know it is).
I have been cast off the RD Island most days and into your local bars/restaurants/
growler stores around Hudson Valley talking to owners/ managers about our
beers. It has been crazy traveling
around the area trying to hit up every place that serves craft beer a week (I
can only go out once a week), but everyone seems to be super excited about our
beers! If you are in the Hudson Valley and want to plug us at your local craft
beer bar I would have no objections (sad plug I know).
Finally, we are getting shipments weekly with funstuff like
growlers, glassware, hops, grain, kegs, and other materials to get RD
functional within the next couple weeks.
Thank you for being so patient with us and supportive of us while we get
things off the ground! Nikki
Wednesday, June 6, 2012
Home Stretch?
So what’s new? The answer is lots!
The good news is that by this time next month I expect to
have beer in the fermenters. The bad news is that there is still a ton to do
before that happens.
On the construction front, we are starting to install
equipment. The fermenters are currently getting piped in to the glycol chiller
which controls the temperature of the fermenting beer. Also, our brewhouse
(which is heated with electrical elements) is getting assembled, piped, and
tied in with our electrical service.
On the marketing front we are currently pounding the pavement
trying to get our name out. We’ve been going to local bars/restaurants to let
them know that we should be on tap at their establishments, and we’ve also been contacting local press
to try and garner some free press. In addition to that, we also just met with
our artist again (Nick at Dead Seagull) to get some drafts put together for the
individual labels of our beers. It was a fun meeting. I’m already really
excited about the names/stories behind our beers, and it was even more exciting
to brainstorm the illustrations and word-types to go along with the names. In
the coming weeks we’ll probably be revealing some of the names and hopefully the graphics of our beers.
On the licensing front, the government is being…well the
government. In theory we should be hearing back any day from both the state and
federal governments telling us that we either need to provide more documents or
that we can brew when we’re ready. However, I’ve learned that both agents responsible
for our respective applications only work four days a week, and when they do work it seems like
it takes at least six phone calls from me just to get one returned. On top of
that, we’re running into some more red tape with the local government.
I’m sticking with big picture thinking, though. Those hang
ups should be relatively painless in the long run. To end on a positive note, I’ll remind you that WE ARE ABOUT A MONTH AWAY FROM BREWING!!!
- Dan
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
Post CBC
We (Nikki and I) got back from the Craft Brewers Conference
in San Diego last week. It was an amazing trip! I say that because it was as
much a vacation as it was a great learning experience. Because of that, I think
I’ll break it down from both perspectives…
Vacation: The best part of the whole trip was amazing beer
available at all times…literally all the time. We would start the day at 10 or
11 o’clock and there would be beer available that would be so awesome that it
would make the average beer geek blush. Even the events away from the
conference were amazing. We got personal tours that very few people of the
general public would ever get to see. For example, we got to check out the
brand new White Labs yeast facility where many craft breweries get their yeast.
We also got to take a tour of the absolutely gorgeous new Stone Brewing Company
“complex” that will be open near the San Diego Airport in early 2013.
Business: First of all we met a ton of great people, both
from the local New York scene and in general. There were a lot of people that
were very supportive of Rushing Duck, so for that a gigantic THANKS! Besides
that, we actually had a ton of work to do making contacts for all of the equipment
and marketing needs that we’ve been neglecting until now. Lastly, the seminars
were completely invaluable. They spanned the gamut from technical to philosophical.
I think the biggest thing I picked up, though, is that everyone seems to say
that at our size, our biggest problem will probably be not being able to sell
beer fast enough….You cannot imagine how much I hope that that’s our biggest
issue!
That’s it for now, but lots of updates to come. We in the
middle of upgrading our electrical service, building our tasting room, and we
are getting scary close to hearing back from the government on our alcohol
licenses.
-
Dan
Monday, April 30, 2012
Rushing Duck Logo
If you’ve looked on our Facebook page recently you might
have seen our logo was finally posted (it's also at the bottom of this post). It was done by Nick Penta. He is a very
talented artist and he also happens to own Dead Seagull clothing company. I was hoping that it would have been done a while ago, but I
really only have myself to blame for that. Being a newb to this whole thing, there
are a lot of aspects of this that I had absolutely no knowledge of; getting our
logo designed was one of them. I had no idea what the steps in the process were(brainstorming,
going through multiple drafts, more brainstorming, getting a black and white
version, more brainstorming, more drafts, ending with a final color logo), and
therefore had no idea how long it’d take.
Regardless of my oversight, I couldn’t be happier with the logo. I think
it does a great job of paying homage to the 1940-1950’s story behind our name,
but still looking modern and fun. Hope you all like it too. I’m not sure how
many people actually read this, but we will be printing t-shirts soon (also
done by Nick at Dead Seagull). We’ll keep you updated on that.
So with that issue resolved, we move right on to the next. We
need to start thinking about getting individual beer labels designed. It seems
like we have a lot of time being that we are still about two months away from selling beer, but being that the labels need government approval we’re actually
behind on that too. The fun never ends.
I’d like to write a bit more, but I’m actually in a rush. I
desperately need or organize myself and pack for the Craft Brewer’s Conference
that I’m leaving for tomorrow morning. For the next five days I’ll be in San
Diego attending brewing lectures, making contacts with other brewers and
suppliers, and drinking a lot of Southern California’s finest beer. Be jealous.
- Dan
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