Follow Sean Inman to the best in craft beer
This summer will bring a new little brewery to Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena, Wild Parrot Brewing.
You can hear more about the brewery over at the Experimental Brewing podcast with Drew Beechum and Denny Conn. Quick points are that the brewery has been a long time in the making and will aim for late July and looks to do more on the lighter side of the beer style spectrum.
I don’t normally post about beers that are pert near impossible to land so think of this as an early recognition for what may be a new L.A. brewery.
The San Pedro nano is Feral Earth, helmed by Javier Rodriguez who also brews over at Brewjeria. Keep an eye out and snag a bottle if you can.
Carpinteria, California is our second stop in this holiday season as we visit BrewLab.
This brewery puts the nano into nano-brewery using only a 1.5bbl brewhouse. And they put the rotating into action, as they brewed over one hundred beers in their first year of operation. They are also deep into how they source their ingredients using almost entirely organic grains and are growing Santa Barbara terroir hops.
Here are some recent taproom offerings that looked good to me…
Alliance – “crisp & dry saison infused w/ lime zest & cracked peppercorns”
Californica – “50/50 rye/pilsner tart gruit brewed w/ coastal sagebrush & lemon verbena”
Rye Brett Rye – “super funky rye farmhouse ale w/ brett”
Look Up – “dry & complex table saison”
Hessian Horseman – “German-style pilsner w/ German hops, malts, & yeast”
Hess Brewing’s Great Nanobrewery List is an awesome resource.
A listing of (as of January 2012) the 82 Nano’s in operation and the amazing 50 that are on the road to brewing. It’s all alphabetized with links back to the brewery sites.
Take a spin and see if there is one in your neighborhood that you should pay a visit to.
The Portland brewery boom shows no sign of abating! Burnside Brewing just cracked open their doors and now another nano is moving forward with their brews!
“Beetje (\’bee-cha’\) is a Flemish word that roughly translates to “little”, or “little bit”. This brewery will live up to that notion for the foreseeable future.
Beetje will produce small batch beers using high quality ingredients. I intend to use organic 2-row and organic pilsner as my base malts. As much as possible I will use organic specialty malts, and hops. Sound familiar? Yeah, a lot of breweries do this, particularly in the Northwest. I like the approach, and intend to employ it. Quality inputs tend to have a positive impact on the beer”
And here are the beers you can try….
B-sideABV: 5.5% || IBU: 30
B-side is a light , crisp and refreshing farmhouse ale. Golden to light orange in color with a floral nose and a dry finish. B-side is brewed with three base malts: Organic Pilsner, Organic 2-row and Rye. Northwest grown Willamette, Golding and Hallertauer aroma hops offer a soft underlying bitterness to help bolster the refreshing nature of the beer. The key note speaker in this beer is the Farmhouse Ale yeast.
Traditionally farmhouse ales were brewed on farms in the French and Flemish regions of Belgium. These beers were born out of necessity as most water was not potable and the farmers needed a light, refreshing low alcohol beverage to offer the hardworking farmhands.
Little Brother
ABV: 8.5% || IBU: 20
Little Brother is in the vein of a Belgian dark strong ale. By Northwest standards an 8.5% beer may not be considered strong, but it is currently the biggest beer Beetje produces. It pours dark brown, with shades of ruby and a creamy tan head. The flavor is dominated by caramel, and candy and offers a smooth finish. Chocolate and coffee begin to emerge as the beer warms.
Flemish KissABV: 5.7% || IBU: 35-40
A clean Northwest pale ale with a subtle kiss of Flanders. Brewed predominantly with organic 2- row, the malt bill is rounded out with organic light munich, organic 60L crystal and caravienna. Northwest Golding and Hallertauer hops provide a pleasant hop character. Right out primary fermentation this beer is decidedly a Northwest pale ale, but as it enters secondary a bridge to Belgium is built with a dose of brettanomyces bruxellensis.
Here is what their website says about themselves:
“Little Brewery, Big Biere
Parish Brewing Co. is a nanobrewery (yes, nano! smaller than micro!) in Lafayette, Louisiana. Parish will be bringing Acadiana and the rest of Louisiana uncompromising, craft brewed beer (or biere in our native cajun french). Using only the finest ingredients, we’d never cut costs at the expense of flavor.
Think of Parish as an upstart local brewery in cajun country doing battle against boring, tasteless swill.”
This biere (the first on their list) really caught my eye:
“Canebrake
Brewed with Louisiana sugarcane! A new Louisiana tradition in the works. Crisp and easy to drink, this sparingly hopped American wheat focuses attention on the understated sweet remnants of sugarcane.”
Another NEW brewery in the beer rich City of Roses? Yes, please.
Now it’s Coalition Brewing!
They will be opening sometime this month. Beer start-ups are still accelerating.
More news to follow.