Yesterday I had the opportunity to brew with Rick Smets at Left Coast Brewery, the production brewery for Oggi's in San Clemente. Rick is a great guy and a very knowledgeable brewer, so I picked his brain as I helped him brew a batch of hefeweizen. I found out Left Coast is going to start bottling their IPA, stout, and Hop Juice in 22 oz. bottles. They are all great beers, I recommend seeking them out. They were going to bottle Hop Juice yesterday, but their new bottling line is still being worked out. I also helped out with the filtering of their IPA with their plate and frame filter. I'm glad I won't be filtering, it's a bitch! It's amazing to see the difference between an unfiltered beer and a filtered beer. We started at 5:15 AM and finished up around 1 PM, leaving me the rest of the day to work on my own brewery.
After brewing in the morning, I didn't feel like doing much for the rest of the day. I sucked it up and decided to do something about my bottle storage problem. After 4 hours of moving stuff around and carefully stacking pallets, I can see that ordering this many bottles will work for me. Here's some before and after pictures:
Before:
After:
As a sidenote, I get a lot of enjoyment visiting brewers and getting to know them. There are so many passionate, generous, interesting people in the brewing industry, and I feel lucky that I get to work in this business alongside them. I hope they feel the same way about me (don't worry, I won't always ask this many questions or be this annoying!), and I look forward to doing my share of helping out new brewers and brewery owners. Alright, enough sucking up.
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