Shoulder season
Published 5:00 am Friday, October 4, 2013
- The festival-filled summer may be over, but 10 Barrel Brewing Company is working on several fall and winter brews, while preparing for the next round of summer marketing.
Last fall, 10 Barrel Brewing Company brewer Tonya Cornett started toying around with a wheat IPA.
She did some tinkering, tested the beer in the brewery’s pub on Galveston Avenue in Bend, then tweaked it some more. About six months later, 10 Barrel’s O.G. Wheat IPA found its way into bottles.
“Summertime is crush it time,” 10 Barrel brewmaster Jimmy Seifrit said. “Our biggest sales are those months … but (in the) fall, we’re still hammering it pretty hard.”
While the crazy festival-filled days of summer are over for area breweries, the autumn months can be just as busy. Fresh hop beers, pumpkin recipes and Oktoberfest brews are of immediate concern.
Winter seasonals are often in the fine-tuning process. Summer beers and marketing plans for the coming year are starting to take shape.
“Developing a beer typically takes about six months,” Seifrit said. “We’ve got a holiday seasonal that’s coming out in November that we started in May. There’s been numerous renditions where we make lots of little tweaks. … We’ll make a 10-barrel batch and it’ll last about 10 days at the pub, where we get great feedback.”
GoodLife Brewing is using the shoulder season to double its fermentation capabilities and expand its canning line. That’s on top of preparing for the release of its winter seasonal, Pass Stout.
“The next three months for us, it’s expansion,” said Ty Barnett, one of the brewery’s co-owners. “We’re at a 12,000-barrel capacity now. With the expansion, we should be at about 25,000.
“We don’t say no to our home market: Bend, Portland and Eugene,” he said. “But places like Boise and Seattle, they want more beer and we haven’t had any.”
Breweries often sell the most beer by volume over the summer, but winter brews, at least at 10 Barrel, are the company’s top-selling seasonals. The fall months offer a final few weeks to perfect what are often a brewery’s most complex beers.
“In the winter, you slow down a bit and have time to work your way through a beer,” said Seifrit, explaining the winter-beer phenomenon. “You have more time to think about what you’re drinking, more time to work through the nuances of the beer. Winter beers are a lot more robust and have more flavor.
“It’s cold at night, we try to put a little more alcohol in there,” he said. “(We) try to put a little more burn in the chest.”
Looking farther down the road, GoodLife is in the early stages of figuring out its imperial line for next year and possibly a lager.
“We’re game-planning for next spring and summer,” Barnett said. “We’re doing some fun barrel-aged stuff, and we’re putting out an imperial series with our (Descender) IPA and Sweet As. The Evil Sister (imperial wheat beer) we had at Bend Brewfest, we’re bringing that back.
“We’re taking the next gamble,” he said about GoodLife’s expansion, “but 2014 should be a fun year.”