We shipped our first keg of beer just six months ago, and already Bucket Brewery needs to expand to meet demand!  It’s a good problem to have but still one we want to solve.  This first phase was funded by us.  To grow we will need help.  Please check out our Indiegogo fundraising page to learn more about our expansion plans and to see how you can help while getting some great Bucket swag and other perks.
http://igg.me/at/bucketbrewery/x/2803367

Please help spread the word and thanks for your support!

Here at the Bucket, we get a lot of calls and emails from people who want to take tours of the brewery. For a variety of reasons, we don’t offer tours at the moment. We do, however, want to give people a look at the operation that is the Bucket Brewery.

As you navigate the halls of the Lorraine Mills on Mineral Spring Ave., you may happen upon the doors of our facility.  The space we are in as of this writing is a 375sf room that is packed tight with equipment and ingredients.  Come on in and have a look around!

As soon as you open the door, you can see almost the entirety of the brewery.  Directly ahead, against the windows, you can see one of the brew pots that makes up our brewhouse.

Immediately as you walk in, you can will see our empty kegs waiting to be filled with beer.  Actually, I guess we are kind of like the kegs in that respect!

The brewing process starts when we mill our grains.  Most of our grains are different varieties of malted barley.  Inside the husks of the grains, lie the sugars that will be extracted and eventually converted to alcohol.  The small grain mill above can hold about 10-15lbs of grain at a time.  The drill turns a grinding wheel that pulls the grain in, cracking the husks.  The milled grains then fall into a five gallon bucket which is carried to the brewhouse when full.  Each brew day, we will use 100-150 lbs of grain, so a good number of trips are made back and forth to get this done.

The brewhouse is where most of the action is on a brew day.  Our brewhouse, like most, uses three vessels.  In this case they are 55 gallon steel pots.  The nearest one is the Hot Liquor Tank (HLT).  Here, water is heated to between 170 and 180 degrees.  It is then pumped into the next vessel over which is the mash tun.  The mash tun is where the cracked grains await.  Once the hot water is mixed with the grains, we get a mash with a temperature between 150 and 160 degrees, which is optimal for extracting the sugars from the grains.

Cracked grains in the mash tun. Water is not yet added.

Hot “strike” water is added

And finally all of the grains are immersed in hot water.

Once the mash is full, it is left to steep for 60-90 minutes, depending on the recipe.  The result is a very sweet liquid called wort that is then pumped into the third and final vessel in the brewhouse, the boiler.  More hot water is added to the mash and it is allowed to steep for a shorter amount of time.  That is then added to the boiler and a final “sparge” is done to rinse any remaining sugars out and into the boiler to top it off.

The newly made wort is then boiled for 90 minutes, during which time we add hops at different times.  Depending on what hops are used, and when they are added you will get either bitterness or a floral, aromatic quality.  We try to always get a good balance of both.

This is a view across the brewhouse to the fermentation room

The inside of the fermentation room

Once the wort is done boiling, it is chilled and put into one of our fermenters.  A run through our brewhouse will produce 30 gallons of wort, or half a batch.  Each day we run through the process twice to fill one of these stainless steel tanks.  Once the cooled wort is in the tank, yeast is added.  Over the next week or two, the yeast will consume the sugars in the wort and produce alcohol.  At the end of a brew day, a report it attached to the tanks that lists all of the details of that particular batch.  This report will follow the beer until it leaves the brewery.

The fermentation room is temperature controlled to remain in a temperature range that the yeast thrive in.  Doing this is important to ensure that they can complete the fermentation and not create any undesirable flavors in the beer.

After completing the majority of their fermentation in the steel tanks, the nearly finished beer is then moved into plastic tanks for conditioning.  This helps us clear a lot of the yeast out of the beer.  These tanks also allow us to reharvest some yeast for use in a future batch of beer.

After a week or two in the conditioning tanks, the beer is moved into kegs, which are then put in temperature controlled chest freezers on the other side of the brewhouse.  The photo above is taken from the fermenting room and shows the very small scale of the brewery.  You can also see that storage happens wherever there is an inch of space… I’ll show more that that later.

In the chest freezers, the kegs are pressurized with CO2 to provide carbonation.  This process takes about a week to complete.  Extra space in the freezer provides a home for bags of hops and jars of yeast that were harvested from other batches.  Once the beer is carbonated to our liking, it is shipped out to our distributor and then on to your favorite bars and restaurants!

Now that we’ve been through the brewing process, let’s take a look around the brewery a bit more:

Large bags of grain are stored up above the fermenters in the fermentation room.

We store items in every nook and cranny in this space.  What we lack in floor space, we make up for in height, so shelves provide homes for much of our equipment.

Bottles, grains, hosing and other equipment is stored above all of the action in the brewhouse.

The grain room/office is home to plumbing and electrical equipment.

We sometimes take the time to do some experimentation.  When I was taking photos for this tour, Erik had one such experiment running.  He had brewed up a batch of our Rhode Scholar, but rather than putting it into a large fermenter, it was separated into several home-brew fermenters.  Each one was given a different type of yeast to see what the differences would be.  We haven’t had a chance to drink them yet, but even visually, the difference is remarkable.

Same Rhode Scholar, different yeasts

I hope this gives you a good insight into the workings of the Bucket Brewery.  If you have any questions or want me to take some pictures of other aspects of the brewing process, just leave a comment.

-Nate

Oh man, did we have a great time yesterday at the inaugural RI BrewFest at the Pawtucket armory.

Our long day started with prep work at the brewery at 7:00am. With our biggest presence to date about to commence, we didn’t want anything to go wrong. Equipment was all double-checked, every possible supply was packed up, beer was sampled for quality. Okay, that last bit was pretty fun. Then, after a great breakfast at Doherty’s we headed over to the armory to load in all of our equipment and set up the booth.  The event organizer, Matt Gray did a great job supporting the local brew scene with the RI breweries, supply stores and the RI Brewing Society homebrew club all located up front.

Before setup:

Our booth with our first load of supplies

After, with our banner up and table artfully arranged:

Ron mans the fully assembled Bucket booth

Once we were set up, we got to talk to a lot of our fellow brewers and some homebrew supply store owners who were stationed near us.  It was our first chance to meet the guys from the brand new Whalers Brewing Co. from Wakefield RI and sample their IPA.

A few minutes before the doors opened at 1:00pm, I took a look out to see an intimidating number of enthusiastic beer fans waiting to come in and drink.

Once people came in, the band started playing and we were off.  Bucket had a non-stop crowd of people coming by.  Many had heard of us and were very eager to finally taste some of our brews.  Others were simply excited to learn that Pawtucket had a new brewery in town.  The reaction to our beers was positive and enthusiastic.  At various times we served up the Park Loop Porter, Rhode Scholar, Festive Stout and Pawtucket Pail Ale.

The crowd in front of the Bucket booth during the afternoon session

A look down our row of brewers during the afternoon session

The guitarist from “The Mighty Good Boys” rocks the brewfest in his new Bucket Brewery shirt

The slightly larger evening crowd

The Bucket booth in full operation

Pawtucket Mayor Don Grebian stopped in for a taste of the Pawtucket Pail Ale

A photo of the whole Bucket crew at our booth

We were exhausted at the end but had a great time!  Thanks so much to everyone who tried our beers, bought shirts and stayed to chat a bit.  We all left there feeling absolutely buoyed by all of the enthusiastic support!

Rather than a usual blog post, I’d like to take a minute to welcome people who are just learning about the Bucket Brewery. In the coming days there will be a lot of new press out about us and we will be appearing at the much-anticipated Inaugural RI BrewFest.

The Bucket Brewery has been in the works since the summer of 2011, and started shipping beer to local establishments at the end of November 2012. We are a hands-on, very small scale brewery focused on producing small batches of very high quality beers.

Here are a few questions that I get often:

Is your beer available in bottles or cans? Currently Bucket beers are available only in 1/6BBL (5 gallon) kegs. As we grow, we anticipate adding the space and equipment needed to bottle or can our beer.

Do you do tours or tastings? For the time being, we are doing this part time and in a tiny space. When we are there we are hard at work making great beer. Making beer is a wet, messy process that consumes the whole space… having guests at this time just isn’t practical.

Do you have any merchandise? Yup, we just printed our first run of shirts in assorted styles and colors. These will be on sale starting at the RI BrewFest, and we will find a way to keep selling them after that. Pint glasses are next on the list.

To learn more about our current beer lineup, please check go to http://bucketbrewery.com/our-beers

To learn where our beer is being sold, check out http://bucketbrewery.com/whos-serving-bucket-beer. Not every location will have our beer on every day, but all of the listed locations have us in their rotation.

If you are a bar or restaurant owner interested in putting our beer on tap, you can purchase Bucket Beer through our distributor, Sage Cellars. They are at http://sagecellars.com. You can always contact us as well, and we will bring samples of our beers to your establishment for a tasting.

Bucket beers have been on sale in a few locations for a couple of weeks now and the feedback has been fantastic!  A frequent comment, however, has been that the Rhode Scholar which is often billed as a kolsch is not strictly true to that style.

Well, that is true enough.  So why do we do it that way?  When we craft a new beer, we’ll start off by making a fairly generic version of a given beer.  There are plenty of style guides out there, as well as recipes online that one can pour through to find the common traits and ingredients of a given style.  We do the research and then see what we get when we try to brew by the books.  Once we have something good, then it is time to try and make it distinctive and unique to the Bucket Brewery.

At this point it comes down to individual tastes.  Whoever is crafting the beer will try the basic version and think about what tastes they think will complement the style.  Would the beer be better with a stronger citrus taste?  Should it be sweeter? Drier? More or less bitter?  Tweaks will be made across the board to try and hone in on exactly the taste we want.  In the case of the Rhode Scholar, Erik favored the lemon and pepper flavors he managed to get out of his hop and yeast choices.  In the upcoming Pawtucket Pail Ale, I worked towards a toastier, maltier base on one end and lots of hop aroma with a touch less bitterness on the other.  Both beers have evolved for years as they were refined.

These changes can and do result in beers that aren’t strictly in the style they started out in.  The Bucket philosophy is that we don’t care!  The end result are beers that we really like, even if they don’t fall neatly into a category from a style guide.  On the other hand, there are purists who believe that staying within stylistic norms is an art form and take pride in brewing something unique within those constraints.  Indeed, that is a great challenge to work towards as well, though I think that it is limiting outside of being an exercise in precision.

So, which camp do you fall into?  Should brewers stay true to style or feel free to go outside the lines?

Hi all; I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving and enjoyed some great craft beers with dinner!

We at the Bucket Brewery had a lot for which to be thankful.  On Thursday morning we got confirmation from our distributor that our first two customers are lined up!  Billy’s Restaurant in Barrington, RI and Track 84 in Warwick, RI will both be serving our beer in the very near future.

I’ve been to Track 84 frequently and have always thought it was among the best beer bars in the state.  Just a couple of weeks ago the Park Loop Porter was on tap for a party there.  Dave, the owner, liked it and upon a tasting of the Rhode Scholar Kolsch, was convinced that Bucket beers would fit in well with his eclectic lineup.  If you’re looking for Bucket, or even just a great place to have some interesting beers that you won’t find elsewhere, make sure you get down there for a drink.

I don’t get down to the East Bay as often as I’d like, but after looking at some reviews online and talking to some friends, I’m convinced that Billy’s is a great restaurant to try the Rhode Scholar Kolsch.  Our distributor, Sage Cellars, specializes in finding restaurants that have cuisine that pairs well with the beer and wine they sell, so I’m very confident that this will be a great match for us.  I’m planning a trip to Barrington for dinner and some Bucket soon, and I hope you do as well!  Expect to see Bucket Rhode Scholar on tap by the end of the week.

Billy’s and Track 84 are just the beginning.  We are busy getting samples of our beer out to some other great locations throughout Rhode Island.  Keep and eye on this website and our Facebook page for the latest updates.  I expect to get more confirmations over the coming days and weeks.

Needless to say, everyone here at the Bucket is very excited to see our beers about to become available.  We’ve been working hard to make as much as we can, and have the brewery running at full capacity.  There are full batches of Pawtucket Pail Ale and Rhode Scholar Kolsch kegged up, some Park Loop Porter just about ready to go into kegs and fermenters filled with Thirteenth Original Maple Stout and more Rhode Scholar that should be ready in a couple of weeks.

As our followers on Facebook already know, Bucket was the beer sponsor for the Rhode Island 6 Hour Ultra-marathon and Relay.  In this capacity we provided six cases of beer for use as prizes for the top three relay teams as well as two kegs of beer for the party afterward at Track 84.

The race, which looped around Warwick City Park was a great event.  I (Nate) had run it twice before and returned this year for my third effort with the Wild Colonial Running Club.  Team Acidotic won by a lot, as usual, followed by the Tuesday Night Turtles running club in second.  The Wild Colonial team fought hard for third, but dropped back a couple of minutes in the latter half of the race and the spot went to team Fuel Belt… congrats to them on a well run race!  Bob Jackman, the director of the race was a very gracious host to the Bucket Brewery, allowing me to prominently park the truck for all to see, and mentioning us a lot during announcements.  I used a newly installed tap on the side of the truck to provide free sports drinks to all who wanted it.  We went through a keg and a half of the stuff!

The Bucket Brewerymobile with its newly installed tap serving up refreshing, non-beer beverages at the 6 Hour Ultra and Relay

Six cases of the Bucket’s Park Loop Porter are stacked and ready to be awarded to the top three relay teams.

After six hours of running and a brief awards ceremony, I and many of the runners headed over to the nearby Track 84 bar.  If you haven’t been, Track 84 is a great destination for fans of craft beer.  They have a large selection of some really excellent and unusual beers on tap.  It was a thrill to walk in and see the Bucket Brewery tap handle amongst the other representing such great beers.  Our new Park Loop Porter, designed and named for this event, was poured almost constantly for as long as the kegs lasted.  Most of the Bucket crew showed up for the event and we received plenty of compliments on the porter.  More importantly, we heard it praised in conversations that were just overheard and not directed at us!  In all I’d say it was very well received.  Dave, the owner of Track 84, reportedly liked the beer a lot as well.  He was not around for the party, but I hope to get in touch with him soon to see if we can get the beer back in there soon.

More photos from the race and party can be found at Scott Mason Photography.

Back in the brewery the Pawtucket Pail Ale is almost through its primary fermentation stage and the new batch of Park Loop Porter was showing signs of a strong fermentation as of last night.  A small batch of Kolsch is conditioning and just about ready, while a larger batch is sitting in secondary and will be kegged on Saturday.  We have samples of the Porter to start shopping around and the small batch of Kolsch will provide some new samples as well.  Hopefully we’ll be getting them around this week to some of our favorite bars and restaurants to see if they’re interested in carrying them.

It’s been about two months since I’ve updated this blog.  While those two months would have made for dull blogging, they led to some major progress for us here at The Bucket.

Let’s get right to the big news.  The Bucket Brewery is very happy to announce that we have reached an agreement with Sage Cellars in Warren, RI to be our distributor!  Sage is a small wine distributor looking to make their first moves into the beer market.  Like Bucket, they are new, small and very into providing a craft service that focuses on RI as the unique place that it is.  Anne and Jesse of Sage Cellars immediately took an interest in working with a startup brewery to help it grow and prosper.  It was clear after meeting a couple of times that Sage and Bucket are a great match.

So, with a distributor on board we now are up to brewing at full capacity at the brewery.  Large batches of our Kolsch and IPA have been brewed and are fermenting, with our Robust Porter and Maple Stout to be following in the next week.  We had previously held off on brewing at this capacity because we didn’t know when we might be able to get beer into local bars and restaurants.  With distribution in place, we will now be able to get beer out as soon as it is ready.  That will be about four weeks from the brew day, so the Kolsch and IPA should be on taps starting in late November or early December.  As we make agreements with bars to carry Bucket, I’ll post them up here.  Man it feels good to have a real time frame to put out there!

So, lots of beer brewing, distribution lined up and a real time frame for Bucket beer to be available; What else could possibly be going on?

Well, lots as it turns out.  This Sunday, 11/11, we will be debuting the Park Loop Porter at Track 84 in Warwick for participants in the Rhode Island 6 Hour Relay and Ultra Marathon.  We are all very excited to see our new, spiffy Bucket Brewery tap handles sitting alongside other greats at a fantastic beer bar.  It’ll just be for a day and a private party, but it’ll be a nice taste of life a few weeks down the road.

Finally, Erik and I took a trip down to the Newport Storm brewery in Newport to meet with the owners of almost all of the other brewery and brewpub owners in the state.  The group met to formally pool our resources for advocating new laws, trading ideas, organizing local beer festivals and plenty of other goals we share.  All of the other brewers who were there (HiJinx, Gray Sail, Trinity, Union Station and Newport Storm) were very friendly and supportive of what everyone else was doing.  We had a great time talking with all of them.  The beer scene in Rhode Island exploded in 2012 with us, Ravenous, Gray Sail and HiJinx all starting up.  It is an exciting time for beer lovers in Rhode Island and it is my hope that this group will help foster a proud and thriving beer scene in the state.

Well, that’s all for now.  I expect to be updating a lot more as we start bringing bars and restaurants on board, and fine-tune our lineup.  Thanks to everyone who has followed us here and on Facebook.  It’s taken a long time, but we are just about there!

As always, it feels like getting Bucket Beer to market is just around the corner.  These days, though, that feeling is starting to show some strong signs of materializing.

On one front has been the ongoing hunt for the right distributor.  We’ve met with a lot of companies, ranging from large, regional companies with broad portfolios of beer and taps in almost every bar, to small one-man operations, and everything in between.  Each one brings to the table a set of strengths and weaknesses, as well as varying philosophies.  All of them are very interested in carrying us into the marketplace.  It’s been a tough choice to pick one with features that best match what we want and the way we work.  We have it narrowed down though, and will likely choose one within the next couple of weeks.  That is one key piece of the puzzle needed to get our beer out there.

Of course having some beer to distribute is key as well.  Fortunately that has been going well too.  The brewing process at the brewery is working well, and we have brewed on the past two weekends.  Beating the heat by going with the heat tolerant Saison style seems to be working, and early sampling of the fermenting beer tastes very promising!  The first batch will need another couple of weeks to be market ready, but once it is ready, there will be a steady supply following on a weekly basis.  We are brewing at 1/4 capacity at the moment which means we will probably debut at just one or two locations to start.  The steady brewing schedule and reliable process form the other key piece of the puzzle.  This is the first time both pieces have been in place, and I’m excited to finally start getting our beer out there!

Of course, while the Saison will be our first entry into the market, there are plenty of other beers that we have to put out there.  Once the temperatures are reliably moderate, we’ll start brewing some of those up.  While we wait, Erik and I have been busy doing small batches at home to refine the recipes and try out some new ones.  I took advantage of the long weekend to try a major revision to our IPA recipe.  We bought a big bag of Summit hops and wow, did they smell great!  I had to use them, so I replaced some of the other, more mild hops that I usually use with the Summit and expect an IPA with a great hoppy aroma.

At the same time I did my first experiment with a robust porter style. In November, Bucket is sponsoring the 6-Hour Ultra Marathon and Relay and race director Bob Jackman said that a porter would be the perfect beer for the occasion.  This brew was done with this in mind, but will no doubt make its way into general production as well.  This first batch smelled great in the brew pot, and I can’t wait to drink the finished product!

My last project of the weekend was more of a personal brew, but I’ll tell you a little about it anyway, just to inflict a little beer envy!  A few months ago I initially brewed up this Scottish export ale, and let it slowly ferment over three weeks in a nice, cool environment.  At the end of three weeks I moved it over to a used oak whiskey barrel I picked up.  I dropped the temperature to a chilly 35 degrees and let it age in the barrel and absorb lots of delicious, oak and whiskey flavor.  After a couple of months in the barrel, I finally put the thing into a keg and will start carbonating it.  I did pour a little bit into a glass to try and it is delicious!  I can’t wait for it to be on tap in my basement bar.  I’m not sure if Bucket will be able to reproduce this at a large scale any time soon, but the recipe will definitely go in our files for consideration down the line.

Thanks for checking in and enjoy the short work week!

Well, it’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything up here.  The Bucket Brewery took a break from production for a few weeks due to the heat.  With temps in the upper 80s and into the 90s it was just about impossible to keep the brewery cool.  For those who aren’t familiar with the brewing process, yeast are fickle creatures.  When the fermentation temperatures get too high they get very unhappy and start throwing off all sorts of off flavors (called esthers) and undesired alcohols that taste funny and can leave you with a nasty hangover!  Unfortunately this problem with the heat claimed the IPA we had brewed up.  So, we decided to hold off for a while.

With cooler weather now upon us, we spent the morning cooking up a half batch of our saison.  The yeast in saison is a little more tolerant of the heat than our IPA yeast so if temps creep back up, we should still get a good beer.  If things keep like they’ve been it’ll be fine too.  As temperatures drop in the Fall, we’ll be back to the planned levels of production and readying fresh batches of IPA, Maple Stout and more.

Now, time off from brewing doesn’t mean we’ve been sitting around doing nothing.  Much attention has been paid to polishing the process and tweaking all of our equipment to make the brew days work flawlessly.  Today’s batch put all of that hard work to the test and everything went exactly as planned!

Earlier this month, Pawtucket mayor Don Grebian stopped by to see the place and learn a little bit more about us and our plans.  It was great to meet him.  He was very supportive and let us know that the city was ready to help in any way possible.  It feels good to have that kind of support behind us.

We’ve also started meeting with distributors to find someone who we think we can work well with.  There are a few more meetings lined up in the coming weeks and hopefully we’ll get that part of the business squared away.

We also poured some sample beer at a fundraiser for my good friend Dan’s cycling team, Hot Giraffe, to support their 125 mile AIDS benefit ride from Boston to Provincetown.  Dan lost a family member to AIDS and has been doing this ride to help prevent other people from having to go through that.  If you want to contribute to this good cause, you can donate at the Harbor to Bay website.

Well, that’s about it for this week.  Hopefully Fall will bring lots of new updates and the release of our beers to local bars and restaurants.  Stay tuned!