We’re excited to be featured along with Meathouse for Local Artisans Night at CFB this Wednesday. Local beer + local charcuterie = awesome. You should come.

We’re super stoked about having the first ever Westbrook beer dinner at the Mellow Mushroom in Mt. Pleasant this Wednesday, Jan. 5th! In addition to the first three beers we released recently (Batch 1 Amarillo Pale Ale, White Thai, Belgian Pale Ale) we’ll be bringing 2 new beers. The first, the Belgian IPA, is based on our regular IPA (which hasn’t been released yet). In fact, we actually intended to brew the regular IPA, but the yeast had other plans. Halfway through the brew, we discovered that the English yeast we used in the previous batch of IPA was saturated with hops from dry hopping in the fermentor and therefore unusable. So, we grabbed some of our Belgian yeast from a batch of White Thai and finished the brew as normal. Well, not quite. Somehow the setting on our grain mill had been changed so that the grain was crushed much more finely than normal, which resulted in what is called a “stuck bed.” This means that the liquid (or wort) in the mash tun won’t drain out through the bottom of the vessel like it’s supposed to, resulting in very messy mess when you try to empty out the mash tun:

Exhibit ‘A’

So we decided to punish the beer by dry hopping it with massive quantities of Cascade, Chinook, and Citra. Twice. Our Belgian yeast ate up a greater percentage of the barley sugars than the English yeast normally does, resulting in a higher ABV of 7.7% and a much crisper, drier beer, which along with the fruity/spicy flavors from the yeast really accentuates the hop flavors. It’s no exaggeration to say that the aroma of this beer literally jumps out of the glass. We think you’ll like it.

The second beer doesn’t have nearly as good of a story to go along with it, but what it does have going for it is that we only made 1 single keg and you’ll have to come to the beer dinner on Wednesday to have some!