Fever Pitch...
It’s been a while since we’ve properly shared what we’re up to, so here’s a big slab of words to bring you up to speed. You don’t have to read it all of course, but it’s there if you’re interested! We’ve been keeping ourselves nice and busy as always up in sunny Kirkbymoorside. A few little projects have been taking up mostly all our time: 1. Canning our beer for the first time (starting in August). 2. Making improvements to the brewhouse. 3. Brewing as many fun, unique beers as possible. 4. Trying to keep up with demand for our two most brewed beers: Disco King and Lucid Dream. 5. Tap takeovers, collaborations, and such like.
Where to start?! The most prominent news is probably our beer becoming available in cans. We’ve been flabbergasted by the response so far. This was the first time our beer had been available direct to customer from us. We added a shop to our website, and the amount of people who were waiting in the rafters to try our beer was incredibly humbling. We took our sweet time getting the cans out into the world, but I’m glad that we did. We wanted to get the beer just right, the artwork on the cans just right, and make sure the beer was packaged to as high a standard as possible. It was worth the wait for us to get it right, as eager as we were to release cans of beer back at the start. Since August we’ve canned 4 unique beers: Lucid Dream, Disco King, Space Ritual, and Vision Quest. Next year, look forward to more regular can releases, and more regular stock from us!
Though, it has been great having our beers turn over so quickly. Its important for super hoppy beer to be drank super fresh, and this has meant our beer has been enjoyed in its best possible condition, which is awesome! We’ve also brought in our good friend and collaborator Lottie Walsh to do some of the designs for the cans. You may recognise Lottie’s artwork from a couple of our early brews (Armadillo, Headhunter). Her designs really jumped out at us as a great match for our beers. Expect more Armadillo’s, UFO’s, anthropomorphic hop peeps, and everything/anything else you can think of, on some of our cans next year. Starting as soon as we have cans back in stock, you’ll also be able to buy cans direct from the brewery, collection or online, on a regular basis. We trialled this with temporary sales windows, and are happy to report it went well, so we’ll be making it a “thing”. Another exciting project has been sending our beer overseas. We’re now working with importers in Holland, Spain, and France to send our beer out into the world. There’s something incredibly cool about seeing our beers pop up in bars many miles from home! We’ve booked a couple of international beer festivals and collaborations for next year, starting in Holland in March.
We’ve managed to squeeze in an additional fermenter, increasing our output by around 20%. This in combination with having a few extra pairs of hands around has meant we’ve doubled our output from last year, and then some! Next year, we’ll be looking to make a few more brewhouse changes, add a couple more shiny tanks, and bring you more beer than ever before!
We’ve been incredibly fortunate to brew with some of our absolute favourite breweries in the short time we’ve been going. Collaborating with other breweries will continue to be a huge part of what we do. Over the last few weeks/months we’ve brewed with Wild Weather, Mad Hatter, Ridgeside, Black Iris, and Twisted Barrel. All fantastic breweries that we’ve learned something from, and had fun making beer with. Next year we have some incredibly exciting collaborations lined up too, so keep an eye out for those!
We’re loving making so many different beers. This year has been a journey into the world of dry-hopping, to get our beer as juicy and fruity as possible. We love those little green flowers immensely and will keep toying with techniques to cram as much hop character as we can into our beers. You may have also noticed, we bloody love making imperial stouts: I think we’re up to four this year, with another one in the schedule for January. Again, we’re going to keep doing what we’re doing, and continue to focus most of our time brewing up as many unique and interesting beers as we can!
A real highlight of this year for us was BrewDog Collabfest. We brewed a mint choc chip ice cream pale with our friends from BrewDog York for the occasion. Firstly it was great just to be asked to brew for the event, secondly it was great to see our beer in all corners of the country (and beyond), and finally, we can’t believe (still) that we came out as the top beer overall! To be completely honest we were a bit nervous about how a beer like that would be received, but thankfully it went down a treat. We’ve had people literally (not literally, it’s 2018 and that word has lost it’s meaning, but you know what I mean) knocking at the door begging us to brew this again. All we can say is, we will. We definitely will. Just wait, it will be worth it 😉
We were also invited up to BrewDog for an industry open day. Christ, they have a lot of fancy toys up there, never mind four breweries and a distillery. The trip was a great chance to mingle with some brewers we hadn’t met, some we know and love, and have a good time getting inspired about making beer all over again. It’s been an absolutely nuts year for us. So much going on. It’s not always easy, but we absolutely love what we do and wouldn’t have it any other way. Now we’re just going to enjoy the run up to Christmas, keep making beer as best we can, and keep planning awesome stuff for next year. Thanks for reading all of this, any questions be sure to ask. We don’t bite. Honest. In fact we like when you ask the questions. We will put up another blog at the end of the year with a few best bits and write ups of our favourite beer festivals and collab brews from 2018. Cheers loves! Team TP.
