There was a time that my days consisted of mountain running in the morning and slinging the finest of running shoes to the patrons of the Boulder Running Company during the day.  Evenings, well, they were mostlly consumed with pints of finely crafted beers from the Mountain Sun.  The days that I lived in Boulder were fantastic, filled with a quest for remote territory that could only be traveled to by foot and the requisite thirst for locally crafted food and drink.  Namely, beer.

Fast forward 8 years and I’m sitting in the brewery, running a CIP cycle on the Greenhouse and enjoying a barrel aged Old Rasputin, nice little Wednesday.  Our team of 2 has been staying very busy over the past few months.  We’re currently making as much beer as our brewery will allow, waiting patiently on some of our barrel aging projects to reach maturity and giddy with excitement about the new ones we are just beginning.  We’ve started to sell our two year round beers in 12 oz. cans.  As we speak our Pale Dog is available at both Whole Foods locations, both Central Market locations, Wheatsville Co-op and HEB at Slaughter and Escarpment.  We can all of our beers with a manual two station filling machine.  At top speed we can package close to a case of beer every 5 minutes, pretty slow going.  We’ll start distributing the Alt-eration by the end of the week, most likely to the same places that received the Pale Dog.  We are anxiously awaiting the 3 new 30 bbl tanks that should arrive in June as well as an additional 3 bbl fermenter and bright tank for the Greenhouse!

The Greenhouse has been hard at work as well, pumping out batch after batch of experimental beers.  We brewed a Barleywine back in February and will be splitting the batch between a French Oak Cabernet barrel and a Makers Mark Bourbon barrel.  Since the Greenhouse produces around 100 gallons of beer per batch we should have just enough to fill both barrels.  We’ve been aging a few Jim Beam bourbon barrels with our Pale Dog since December and they are starting to develop well.  The barrels were lacking in bourbon character but contributed plenty of oak.  Next we’ll inoculate both of them with a cocktail of wild yeast and bacteria and let them get funky for a year or more.  We just received a shipment of 6 French Oak Cabernet barrels and 4 Makers Mark Bourbon barrels.   One of each will go to the Barleywine and the rest will be split amongst the Alt-eration and Pale Dog.  And a few of these will get some love from the aforementioned cocktail of critters.

We’ve also got s0me big news that we can’t yet tell you.  Should be rad and awesome and fantastic, but you’ll have to wait to find out what it is.  We’v got to figure it out first…