If you’ve been following along with us on Instagram and Facebook (FYI… we update those a lot more than we do our website), you’ll see we have been keeping busy. We recently poured our beer for the 2nd year in a row at the wonderful Carnivale Brettanomyces in Amsterdam, joined in on another brewing session with the Jacobs brothers in Belgium at Antidoot Wilde Fermenten, and had a collab released at the annual rare beer auction/beer festival Brews For New Avenues in Portland.

Despite all this… we still struggle with finding ourselves much in the same place as we were this time last year. Is AltBrau moving forward? Did our crowdfunding campaign allow us to progress? Where are we going? Let’s save all that for the next blog post and get you caught up with whats going on:

Updates on our beers…

Our 20 oak barrels of saison inspired beer created in collaboration with Steve at Shady Oak are now 8 months old and nearing a level of complexity and acidity that we like. Once we get through peak summer heat in the month of August, I’m confident that some version of the blends we’ve been working on will be ready to move into bottles for a nice rest as they condition and re-ferment. Our goal is to have these beers ready for release around Christmas.

Although I personally lean towards classic beer character (malt, hops, water, yeast/bacteria), we do have some cool fruit experiments going as well. These will most likely not be sold to the general public but used at special events and tastings. Be sure to keep up with us so you know where to try them.

Guns of Brussels v2.0…

The folks over at Freewheel Brewing in Redwood City were looking to revisit our collab with them from a while back… the Guns of Brussels. After getting the blessings of the old brewmaster (Alisha Blue) to revisit the collab, we joined their new head brewer Orion Dakota and his assistant Joanna Dunham and made some adjustments to the recipe. This time around we saw a bit less use of the chamomile and elderflower and a bigger dose of hops. The beer sold very quick over the spring so if you missed it… my apologies.

Carnivale Brettanomyces 2019…

Every year we fall more and more in love with Amsterdam. With the exception of the occasional drunk guy insisting on correcting our pronunciation, the people we run into are some of the most lovely and welcoming folks on Earth. We were honored to be invited back to this awesome festival and given the chance to asist with the execution of the homebrewer’s night. The quality of beers coming from this year’s attendees (pro and amateur) was unbelievable. We are constantly influenced and informed by the brewers from around the world who attend this event and are lucky enough to even call many of them friends.

Brew Day at Antidoot…

As we did last year… following Carnivale I returned to the Antidoot farm in Flemish Brabant for a few days of brewing, cooking, drinking, and inspiration. I was joined once again by Aiden from Bretty Fingers (Sweden), his partner Danielle, and over the course of a few days many other friends from the greater beer community. I had the chance to taste our brew from last year and together we brewed a summer wild ale that was lautered through hay from a new piece of Antidoot property. We used the same hay in the koelschip along with some hops and steeped the additions in hot wort. Their house culture was added once the wort was cooled and it was moved into barrels shortly after. Here is a video from our brew day:

I am so fortunate to be able to visit this wonderful place. Many thanks to the Jacobs family for always being so welcoming. I’d also like to acknowledge my new friends from Atom Brewing, Chien Bleu Brasserie, Von Seitz Theoretic Ales, Brasserie La Montagnarde, Longbeach Beer Lab, Brussels Beer Project, 3 Fonteinen, as well as Dave Janssen and everyone else who made my trip to Europe so amazing. Special thanks to Aiden and Danielle and of course to our good friend Paul. My apologies for everyone I missed… their are too many amazing people to name.

Brews for New Avenues & Collab w/ Tioga Sequoia…

Trevor from de Garde and Alex from Upright

We returned to the beautiful Pacific Northwest for our favorite annual fundraiser. The fine folks at New Avenues for Youth put on BFNA every year to help at-risk youth in their area with food, shelter, counseling, job training, etc. This year alone they raised over $250k!! Non of this would be possible if it weren’t for their hard working staff and of course all the donations by breweries like de Garde and organizations like Lambic.info .

This year we, along with our buddies at Tioga Sequoia Brewing, donated a keg and a few cases of our super small collab made for just this occasion. Avenues & Alleyways was brewed roughly a year ago and spent a long time in the fermenter developing a great complexity before we added hop oil (Azacca) at packaging. This golden brett ale has been in bottles for a few months and we can’t wait to see how it taste at next years BFNA.

Thank you to the staff at New Avenues for always giving AltBrau so much love and of course to Mike Cruz and the rest of the guys at Tioga for working with me on this special beer for a great cause.

So What’s Next?

We are busy working on blends and scrapping together some money to buy a few pallets of bottles. We can’t wait to start packaging this beer and getting out to you ASAP. We are also working on our blending session and beer dinner we promised a few of our Indiegogo backers.

There are a few collabs in the works but nothing we can talk about openly just yet. Stay tuned.

Mid year update! (2019)