Still chugging along

Not much has changed since we checked in last, but things are still going on!

We’re still searching for a location, brewing more beer, and dreaming up more experiments. We’re getting increasingly impatient with this slow process of getting off the ground…but at the same time knowing that this is just how it goes and our patience will pay off soon enough. We’ve chosen a few different options for brewing systems, and if we don’t go ahead and buy one immediately, we’ll definitely be pulling the trigger once we’ve got a place to put it.

Stay tuned, and I hope to have more exciting news for you soon!

My favorite brewing experiment so far

Oak aged lambic cherry coffee porter. That’s what we’ve got aging in our kitchen right now. It’s a mouthful. A crazy delicious mouthful.

I know it sounds like a weird concoction-how can it be lambic and porter at the same time? But it just is. I originally gave JD the ingredients as a Christmas present (and to me, because I wanted to drink it!), not thinking of a future brewery where OTHER people might want to drink our craziness. We thought it would be pretty good, but with all that it had going on, figured it might end up dumped in the driveway. It could have gone either way, but it ended up being quite tasty and mildly sour in its original brew. Nice!

Fast forward to the rodeo, where we met a guy who sells oak barrels, and kicked poor baby Finn out of his stroller so we could roll a barrel to our car in the parking lot a thousand miles away. I wish we had a picture of that.

JD promptly put some of the crazy lambic porter in the oak. After a couple weeks, we tried it. It was NASTY, and not in a good way. Too much oak, way too much oak. Just gross. JD liked it, but I would never drink that again in a million years. We’d already drank the rest of the unoaked, so I thought we’d just wasted some awesome beer. But we gave it some more time, and it’s coming along nicely. The oak mellowed out, and the sour flavor is really starting to stand out. We haven’t decided yet if we’ll be bringing it on board at the brewery, but it’s been a fun experiment so far.

We do plan to make sours for sure. We’ve got a sour brown working right now. I’ve contacted a few local wineries to try and pick up a barrel or two to age in, but have yet to hear back. It’s on my ever-growing to do list to pester them some more. For the sake of good beer and sourness.

Location, location, location

Well, our blog says we’re a Katy Brewing Experiment, but in our brewery’s short life, we’ve already outgrown it. Don’t worry, we’ll soon outgrow this blog for a much better website! With a real logo.

We’ve made the decision to not be located in Katy, but rather in Houston. The Katy decision was mainly for our own convenience, but after looking at real estate, where our customers live, and where our kegs will ultimately travel, Houston is a much better location for what we want to do. We’re still shopping for a teeny tiny warehouse for our teeny tiny brewery, but it looks like we’ll be in the West/Northwest side. Convenient for us, convenient for our future traveling kegs.

Test Batches are Underway!

Our friend Leslie included us is a post about new Texas breweries (yes!!), and I thought this would be a great time for a small update on our progress.

We’re still working on figuring out equipment, but we hope to at least have a plan in place very soon. We’ve shopped a few locations, and our goal is to have a selection within the next two months. Then we’ll get to work on getting legal. There’s still a long road ahead, but we’re on our way!

But enough about the boring stuff…we’re making some new beer!

We have ingredients on the way for a lemon basil blonde and a trippel made with passion fruit and rhubarb. We’re also going to play around with some sodas while we’re at it. Plans are underway for a keezer build to house all of our new beer, which is tentatively planned to make its way to the brewery.

We’re very excited about getting moving on the brewery, and we’ll keep you updated as we go along!

Reading Til My Eyeballs Bleed

Well, let’s hope it doesn’t get that extreme, but that’s what it feels like. I’ve been reading and reading and reading some more. And when I finish with that, I pick up something else to read. It’s a good thing I love reading, and especially love reading about beer and business.

Reading is certainly not brewing, but I think it’s an important part of getting there. We have experience building a business, but not like this. We have experience brewing beer, but not like this. Thus, there is lots of reading happening. Books, online, fine print, you name it. Reading about all the red tape, brewing systems, crazy Alaskan bootleggers…let’s just say a lot of learning has happened, and there’s much more to come.

Meanwhile, we have plans humming along. It feels slow and fast all at the same time. I still feel incredibly underprepared, as there are major holes still left to be filled in on our plan. But we’ve looked at some real estate, laid plans for what we’d like our first beers to be, and are working on stepping up homebrew production for fun, practice, and recipe development.

Yes, we will need some help drinking our experiments soon. More on that to come.

Nameless No More

We’ve got a big update for you in the form of a name:

drumroll…

Small World Brewing Company

www.smallworldbrewing.com

@smallworldbrew

Small World on Facebook

The Experiment Begins

After some contemplation, JD and I have decided that we’d like to start a brewery.

Yes, we know how silly it sounds.

We know exactly how crazy we are. There’s a significant investment of time, money, and energy to start a brewery of any size. Texas is not exactly the easiest place to start in the beer business. We already have one successful business, and a baby boy to keep us busy. Why bother with all this? Because we can’t keep ourselves from trying anyway.

Even with logic stacked against us, the desire for a teeny tiny brewery to call our own exists, and we’re not going to sit on the idea.

We’re in the planning process, but the commitment is there. We will be starting a brewery, even if it takes 5 years to get our first batch out.

So what are we doing now? Well in a word, EVERYTHING. The brewery at its inception is an explosion of questions and research. System sizes, real estate, legal, paying for the whole darned thing…there’s a lot to chew on, and our business plan is in development. Oh, and what the heck are we going to NAME IT?

There’s not a lot to share at this point, but you should know that we plan to go big on a small scale. That is, we’re creating a nanobrewery that focuses exclusively on specialty beers. Specialty meaning weird: sours, fruit beers, alternative ingredients, remixes on standard styles. Because if we’re going to be crazy enough to go to all this trouble, you can be sure it won’t be to bring yet another regular old IPA into this world. It’s going to be a fun experiment and surely a wild ride, and we hope you’ll join us.