It has been awhile since we last did any long writing on what is up at the brewery and taproom so with the mid-year upon us it seems like a good reason for an update. We also hope everyone has a great holiday weekend. We are closed on the 3rd of July and the 4th of July so our employees can enjoy the holiday with their families and friends

Get Your Hops & Flip Flops 2017 Tickets
It’s only just over a month to our annual Hops & Flip Flops Craft Beer Festival taking place on Saturday, August 19th. Once again there is a 5K race in the morning followed by the craft beer festival in the afternoon. Tickets for the VIP and General Admission sessions are available at the taproom and online. We will once again have a great lineup of beers that are not normally seen at festivals from 25 local, regional, national and international breweries. Don’t miss it.

Recent Accolades

It’s always nice to be recognized for our passion of making craft beer. We recently won two awards in the Can Can Awards, which is an annual competition for canned beers that brings entries from around the globe. This was our first time entering this competition and we were thrilled to see our Brett Project win Gold in the Experimental category and Vacation win Silver in the Kolsch category.

 

Brewery Business

It’s been a busy first half of the year. The larger part of our overall production (90%-ish) is our wholesale distribution. Lots is happening in the beer industry and we just continue to focus on what we can control, which is making consistently tasty beers people enjoy.

For people wondering what we are distributing you can always find our current beers in distribution posted online. Besides our seeing Lift Off IPA continue to be very popular we also are happy to be able to be able to ship more Vacation Kolsch, Rip Cord DIPA, and Muse Belgian Golden Ale as well as our new special releases hitting distribution for the first time during the this year including Brett Project IPA in January, Race Day American Craft Lager in April and just released our Pils German Pilsner. Keep enjoying our beers and we will keep making more. So far this year we are growing our volume about +40% compared to 2016 so lots more beer. That said we also sometimes are not able to keep up with demand — if your favorite place is out of Lift Off IPA that might be we didn’t ship enough. It also always is just good to ask about our beers if you don’t see them on the tap tower or the menu as that is the best way to tell places you want them to carry our products.

To support demand we also continue to focus on improving both our brewing processes as well as our capacity. On the quality side of things among the investments we have made this year was an upgrade to a new digital microscope.

 

On the capacity side we added a new JVNW 80 bbl tank in March.

 

At this point we have been in business coming up on 5 years in total and in June we celebrated 2 years since our move to the new brewery in Speedway. That was fast, crazy at times and mostly good. While we have had some welcome market success, and we are now are one of the larger breweries operating in Indiana we are still a small to medium sized business. 

For those that are interested in our brewing capacity we now have 620 bbls. of active fermentation tank space which roughly translates depending on our mix of products to 10,500 bbls. of annual capacity.

Taproom

Our focus at the taproom continues to be to provide a mix of our year round beers, regular releases of taproom only American Pale Ales/IPAs and traditional German, English and Belgian styles that are made using authentic ingredients. At any given time we have 15 to 20 beers on. Right now we have 8 German-Style beers for example including both our Pils German Pilsner and Helles Munich Style Helles in cans.

 

We also continue to evolve the taproom menu. Our goal with our kitchen is to provide food items that pair well with our beers and that we can locally source. We recently added German-style sausages from Claus’ German Meat Market and the best local all-beef hot dogs from King David Dogs. Again, we are a brewery and not a restaurant, so we also continue to encourage people to carry or order in from local restaurants in addition to offering our menu. If you have a craving from something else to pair with our beer then go for it.

And for those reading the post we will let you know that our next release of our NEX IPA — NEX IPA #3 to be exact– is coming on draft and cans just after the 4th of July holiday. Reading this post is the only way to find out at this time. Specific dates for the draft and can release coming after the 4th of July holiday. We even are adding numbers to the can now for each release. See you soon!

 
If you read this far – Thank you!

Aggressively Fun!
Shane