Progress

It’s been a hell of a couple of weeks at the brewery. We got the green light to start building our new space and walls started coming down, equipment got on trucks and the jackhammers started pounding away. The whole Cismontane extended family has been chipping in and we have made progress. If we keep up this pace we will be finished in a few of weeks… maybe. Either way, we won’t rest until the project is done and the beer is flowing again.

Because I know everyone is interested in the stats:

Currently:

• 1591 sqft (395 tasting room, 1,196 brewery)
• 75 barrels of fermentation
• 60 barrels of storage
• Production was about 600 barrels last year

Future

• 3,187 sqft (530 tasting room, 2,657 brewery)
• 105 barrels of fermentation
• 90 barrels of maturation / lagering
• 60 barrels of storage
• We are hoping to do about 1500 barrels next year (A whopping 0.6% of Stones Annual Production for 2011!)

Oktoberfest – Californian Style

It is beautiful time of year in Southern California. The weather is warm the days are long and the transition to fall is just beginning. At Cismontane Brewing we have the added benefit of being on the edge of civilization, as far as Orange County knows it. The back drop of the Saddleback Mountains and the Cleveland National Forest afford some phenomenal views and hiking and mountain biking.

This year is the first year we decided to brew an Oktoberfest beer. Inspired by the season we decided to take advantage of the fact that the California Buckwheat is going to seed and integrate that into the beer. Along with Derek Bougie, head brewer at Newport Beach Brewing we kicked off a new series of beers that will be incorporating native species.

Video by Yoni (he's the man) http://yonisandler.com/

Keg Art

For those for you that spend any time in the brewery you will know that we are supporters of the arts. If fact we even consider what we are doing, as do some others, an art form. Art in our world includes the various artists that hang their shows on the walls, our handmade tap handles and the fine beers we produce. It doesn't end there…

We have been painting our kegs for some time now. Only a few have noticed. Those that have are generally the folks that handle the kegs at the fine establishments that pour our beers. With the addition of 27 more ½ barrels it was time to crank out a few more Cismontane original works.

The process is simple: Paper off the top and bottom, place a stencil in the gap, name and sign with a permanent pen.

Enjoy…

Tap Handle Re-Un-Invented

Plastic, resin, molds, factories in China and India… The list goes on. I apologize up front for my tap handles not being an electric guitar with flashing lights held by a sumo wrestler, or a dragon wrapped around a race car holding a light saber breathing ice and fire.

This may sound insane to some, but we make our tap handles by hand. When I say this, I don’t mean they are “handmade”, because as most of us know that could mean anything these days. What I mean is we make them from gathering the wood, sawing it, stamping the brass plate and finishing it. This time, we added brass plates. Oooooo, shinny.

We have become so far removed from the items that we use on a daily basis I can't tell you where what I own comes from; where my shirt was made, beer glass made, my broccoli grown, my beer brewed.

This is part of the reason that we create and build our handles ourselves. When you have a Cismontane tap handle on your tap tower you know where it comes from. Long story short, we added a brass plate and we still build the tap handles ourselves.

Ingredients: Salvaged Wild Fire Wood, Varnish, Steel Bolt, Brass Plate, Hands.

Please enjoy our latest handle creation along with our latest beers.

Holiday Experiments

Experimenting is definitely one of the more fun practices in brewing beer. Flavors, colors, names all that stuff. Around the holidays brewers get especially adventurous with spices and higher gravity beers. We are happy to fall in suit because it’s just a good time.

Ross and I have been brewing holiday beers together for a few years now. Some of you may have had the pleasure of tasting our Dead Santa from last year, mildly spiced brow ale. This year our beer is going to be called Hammered Holiday because, all the spices that went into it had been smashed with a hammer. No kidding.

We also had a batch of stout finish a few days ago so we thought we should do something special and age some on something…. A quick trip down to Wholefoods produced a lot of somethings….

Cherries, cranberries, blackberries, cinnamon, dates, figs, black strap molasses, agave, ginger... the list goes on। Diving right in we started chopping things up pouring stout on them and tasting. A little of this a splash of that and presto, we had some pretty nice flavors. We settled on two combinations.

1) Cherries, blackberries and cranberries
2) Figs and dates

Awesome!

Come to our holiday party and we will be tapping both of these beers and the hammered holiday of course! It will be on 12/18/2010.

Eastern European Beer Collectors

This is a strange phenomenon that I really wasn’t prepared for. Another one of the subcultures in the world of things that most of us didn’t know was even out there. What I am referring to are the eastern European Beer Collectors.

No seriously, I get an email almost every day from some die hard beer collector in Poland, Slovakia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungry, or the Czech Republic. If I was to total all the counts of beer novelties these people claim to have in the emails they write there would be over 100,000 items!

Sometimes I wonder if the emails are even real. They are all written in the same broken English, everyone seems to have about 6,500 items and I always ask them to send me a self addressed stamped envelope so that I can send them something (which I will) and no one ever does. Besides, how did they find us? We are barely even a blip on the beer radar. So, I think to myself maybe this is some kind of scam, but why and for what?

Just when I have convinced myself they are out to get me, someone will send a picture of themselves or their kid with their collection. I love beer, freaking awesome…

MTB Robot Testimonials

I was hooked up with an awesome MTB crew through a good friend, Andrew Kempe. Because we love mountain biking and they love beer we meshed our passions by providing Coulter IPA for their annual SoCal TrailRiders camping event. Needless to say I would have loved to be there myself to crush beers and trails alike.

One of the coolest things ever: When they returned the kegs and taps and such, they also handed us a book of comments from the riders on the beers! Everyone was super stoked on the beer and our generosity. Apparently what goes around does come around.

I am not entirely sure what came over us but Johnny, you’d recognize him as the dude crushing IPA at the bar or sleeping on our couch, started reading the comments like a robot / Steven Hawking recording. Here are some of the ridiculous recordings for your viewing pleasure.