Be our co-pilot?
You may have seen some photos on our social media a while back of the new & very spiffy 5 bbl small-batch brewhouse from Premier Stainless we installed and started up last fall. Our main brewhouse makes from 32 bbl up to 45 bbl per brew, which is a decent amount of beer. 45 bbl equals 270 5.17 gallon kegs or 465 cases of 24 16oz cans, meaning that when we brew something new we need to already have a plan in place to sell that beer in a timely manner.
And to be honest all the various tasks you have to do to sell the beer (get formula and/or label approvals, register the brand with various state agencies, take preorders from wholesalers and schedule shipments) are not always the most fun things to do.
So our new little brewhouse lets us test new recipes, processes, and generally brew whatever we want and not really have to worry about all that other stuff. We are currently on a big lager kick here at Westbrook (and plan to be for quite a while, more on that later) so the first couple brews from the pilot system have been lagers and lager hybrids.
So far we have released just 2 beers brewed on the pilot brewhouse (Nü Kölsch and 14° Czech-style lager) but we have a lot more cool stuff planned.