Expanding Capacity

08-11-11

Last week I went to Auckland and spend 24 hours with the talented Shane Morley of Steam Brewing Company. Together we have worked out how to brew HopWired at his brewery and brewed the first batch. That’s right, we are outsourcing our most popular beer.

This is something I have wanted to do for a while: The demand for both Renaissance and our beer is growing fast.  This means that capacity is getting tight at the brewery and it has been hard to fit new beers in the brew schedule. Obviously Renaissance has first pick of the tanks, we just fill them when there’s nothing else in there. So, in order to make more new beers, we decided to outsource our biggest seller, HopWired. This is also the only beer that has been brewed to the same recipe since the beginning. All other beers I tweak almost every time we brew them. Therefore HopWired is the obvious candidate to outsource:  I can’t make it better than it is, but I think Shane can. No NZ brewery has more experience in brewing hoppy pale ales than Steam.

Starting off, Steam will only brew the bottled beer. I will keep brewing the kegged beer at Renaissance. This is mainly for ease of logistics, but also to keep track of how/if the beer changes by being brewed at a different brewery.

The first benefit of the extra capacity may be brewed in less than 3 weeks: Kjetil (Perhaps the world’s second most famous Kjetil, next to legendary alpine skier Kjetil Andre Aamodt)  from the Norwegian brewery Nøgne Ø is coming to New Zealand and we are working on a 3 way collaboration: Nøgne Ø, Renaissance and 8 Wired. It’s not set in stone yet, but if it all comes together, I’m sure we’ll have a lot of fun and make some great beer.