What's been happening here??

Well, we've been pretty busy here at the brewery as of late. We had a fair amount of down time and that was because we had the new tanks installed. I'll post some pictures of that here so you can see what we had to do to get that taken care of. In a few words though it meant removing four of our five fermenters. We shoe horned in the two new tanks and brought back three of existing tanks. One was sold to English Ales in Marina, CA and I hope that fermenter serves it's new owners as well as it did us. I'd like to give a shoutout to the guys at Silver State Stainless who did a great job on the tanks and helping us get everything in order...

The glycol cooling is getting hooked back up to the tanks and we have been brewing to get everything full and ready for the skiing season. We've got Foggy Goggle, Donner Party Porter, Trifecta Tripel and a double batch of Manifesto all in the tanks. With Base Camp and Rockslide on deck. Our barrel aged Imperial Stout also known as Imperial Eclipse Stout will be moved into kegs and our new Bright tank soon. Each barrel has to be tasted to determine if it's kegged or sent to the bright tank for bottling. The process should take a few days as this liquid gold needs to be handled gently. Bottles should be available around Christmas but watch this space as that date is still a moving target.

When we brewed Trifecta Tripel we had a guest brewer, Brandon Wright from Silver Peak Brewing in Reno came by to witness the magic Kyle and I perform. I'm not really sure Brandon got the full effect but as brewers we all do things differently basically as we all learned a certain way to do things... Brandon helped out quite a bit and he also took lot's of notes so I imagine he's either telling lot's of FiftyFifty jokes now or he learned a few new tricks...maybe both!!

On November 20th we acquired 40 kegs to help us further our expansion plans. These are 50 liter kegs and they are in good shape. We've got to clean them up and mark them as ours with our neon orange keg tape. The 20th was also Kyle's 40 something birthday...apparently he's not saying exactly so you may have to pry it out of him...

To close this posting I just wanted to say "did you know I was going to Germany?"...more of a bad running joke than anything. I head out for my annual trip to Bavaria. I go for the Christmas markets, beer research and r&r. I'll try to post from afar and let you all know how tough life is from over there.

Cheers!

Todd Ashman
Brewmaster