Thursday, June 21, 2012

Black Sword Brewery

It's somehow never been something I've written about on here (or really anywhere else), but I've been brewing beer for about a year and a half at this point, along with Jason (proprietor of Spark'i'th'dark) and Beau (who doesn't have a blog that I'm aware of). We've had some successes, (particularly a sort of Belgian dubbel thing with strong cherry overtones that we call The Bastard Prince and a wheat beer we're calling Easy Win after our first batch turned out terribly) and some failures (the initial batch, which I won't discuss here because it makes me sad). Most of the fun to this point has been in the experimentation and recipe building; a lot of the beers we make are difficult to categorize according to Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP) style guidelines, mostly because of the adjuncts we've been using. It turns out that if you're going for a certain style of beer, you can't just dump a bag of cherries in during secondary fermentation and expect that they'll go for that. It does, however, make everything delicious and occasionally higher in alcohol.

In any case, after a trip to a restaurant convention with the primary goal of "try all of the cheese samples" that I might write more about at some point, we've been in contact with a few people with actual, for real breweries and a few distributors who expressed interest in getting our beer into kegs and, from there, into pubs around the city. Which would be unreal. Since then, we've applied for and received our tax paperwork and are in the process of building a facility (well, a rig in Beau's girlfriend's garage that'll allow us to brew enough to make this feasible) and filing the actual paperwork to officially become a limited liability corporation. We've got a logo, a shortlist of the beers we're looking to produce commercially (The Bastard Prince and Easy Win among them) and while at the moment we're taking a longview approach because none of us have the thousands laying around to just start this nonsense, it's possible that by early next year, we'll be sort of brewing professionally.

So that's fun. Incidentally, if you have thousands of dollars laying around and want to invest in us, let me know. We would like that.