The last few weeks the tasting room has been pretty slammed. We did our best to keep up with demand by filling our 20 bbl fermentor with a double batch of Pillowfort (which allowed a mega-sized variant Vanillafort). Both barely survived the weekend. Which is fine, because Saturday we tapped a fresh batch of Cheater Hops (this time with Motueka, Simcoe, and Mosaic) and later this week we’ll tap Cryovolcano, a new Citra-Mosaic DIPA! We’ll be making a super-sized variant of it with grapefruit zest to tap on Thursday 3/21!
While a fresh double-batch every three weeks helps, last weekend you thirsty folks drank through 24 kegs of our beer! The 10 bbl batch of Snip Snap took us three weeks to brew and it was gone in just 2.5 days! We just can’t keep up with the current demand with our three fermentors devoted to hoppy beers. So, starting later this month we’ll be brewing monthly 30 bbl batches at Elder Pine in Gaithersburg. They have a beautiful new facility and a talented staff. We’ll be there for every key-point of the brewing process, including bringing our house yeast strain (harvested from a new Galaxy-Citra-Mosaic riff on Rings of Light)! Draft and CANS from the first Citra-Simcoe DIPA in mid-late April! That should buy us time while we add more tanks… cold storage… employees!
Last weekend we released our first fruited sour beer, Atomic Apricot, one of Michael’s favorite homebrew batches. While it has an intense fruit flavor and aroma (thanks to 2 lbs/gallon of apricot puree) it isn’t sweet. We didn’t add lactose, artificial sweeteners, or leave unfermented sugars. This one seems like a hit, so expect Meltdown Mango, Plutonium Peach, and Gamma Ray Guava in the months to come!
In non-beer news, we were granted a low-priority food license for the tasting room. We’ll still have food trucks almost every day, but we’ll add non-alcoholic drinks and pre-packaged snacks to our menu. Scott is fond of candy descriptors, so now you’ll be able to pair our beers with actual candy! Hopefully good dark chocolate to go with the new 9% ABV stout we have fermenting!
Coffee Event – On April 3 from 5:30-7:30 PM, we have an awesome event planned in our tasting room with Hyattsville’s Vigilante Coffee. Each $35 ticket comes with sample pours of 8 different coffee beers. We’ll be working with their roaster Franklin Ventura to create unique variants, allowing you to compare the same beer with different beans, techniques, roast-levels etc. Tickets are available here! The event will include a small presentation on each beer and coffee from us and Franklin.
Our YouTube Channel had a viral hit a couple weeks ago with a video comparing Snip Snap brewed on the Sapwood brewhouse to the same recipe on Mike’s old homebrewing gear. 1,000,000 minutes (nearly two years) of human life have been consumed watching the video. We served the two beers blind side-by-side in the tasting room for unbiased feedback and we’re planning similar tastings from time to time, so make sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram if you don’t want to miss out!
Mike & Scott
