Back to Reality
We’re still recovering from a non-stop week of craft beer and friends in Nashville for the Craft Brewers Conference 2023. In case you weren’t able to join us, we wanted to share a few highlights that really stuck with us.
Saturday, before the conference kicked off, we were part of a very special collaboration release at Embrace the Funk‘s Funk Fest. Octatonic was a beer over a year in the making, utilizing cultures from all of the out-of-town partner breweries: Russian River, Allagash, Jester King and Green Bench Brewing.
Our part was to prop these house cultures and add some Nashville flavor to the mix with our own Nashville Wild Yeast — a wonderful heff-like strain harvested right here in town. The beer was aged in ETF’s barrel cellar for over a year before getting canned for CBC week.
We officially kicked off the conference on Sunday with the inaugural Southern Lager Invitational.
Attendees were treated to 18 collaborations with Southern brewers, us, and our pals at Riverbend Malt House. All the beers showcased what it means to take local ingredients and turn them into world-class lager. Our host, Harding House Brewing, was packed to the gills and it felt inspiring to speak with all the brewers who were thinking deeply about these ingredients and how to best utilize them. Check our Instagram story collection to see some photos from the evening.
This was one of the best events at CBC!
This week we were able to announce our collaboration with America’s oldest and most respected brewing school — the Siebel Institute — and Half Batch Brewing out of Hendersonville, TN.
We propped the original Chico strain from Siebel’s vault for this collab. Not your NORMAL Chico strain. The OG.
The resulting beer — New Blaze — is a pale ale that also utilizes experimental hops for a snappy, hoppy presentation with a variant of the classic American ale strain. It was served on the expo floor during the conference.
This was a fun project with Siebel and we’re looking forward to working with them in the future on interesting yeasts from the past and present.
Speaking of our friends at Half Batch……..
They Won GOLD!
We were beyond excited for our local friends to take home some serious hardware Wednesday night. Half Batch won gold for The Fulkin, their house Scottish Ale.
Head brewer Nate banks his own house culture with us and has doggedly stuck to it, never venturing into more common commercial strains. It was a great moment for the judges to experience what we’ve been seeing for years!
The blurry photo above was taken at our Last Call Shindig, which went down at Dino’s late into Wednesday night. It felt fitting to close out the week seeing everyone one last time, with beer from Fait La Force flowing and an Underberg toast.
There were plenty of other great moments including a collab with our friends BKS Artisan Ales and Good Word Brewing — another beer that could have been found on the expo floor. And we spent a great night drinking Spot Yeast beers at Fait La Force, including some guest pours from 2nd Shift, Alliance Brewing, E9 and Trophy Brewing.
Do you have FOMO yet? Just hit us up. There’s plenty more beers to be brewed.