Good morning! The tasting room will be open by 3:00 today and we're fully stocked with growlers, gift cards, tees and hoodies to stoke out the craft beer lover on your holiday list.
We have a whopping 14 house beers on tap right now! The list includes favorites like Continental Cream and Dork Squad, as well as a few new comers like License To Kilt (Scotch Ale) and Golden Girl (Belgian Golden).
Come on in and treat yourself to a flight and be the hero at your holiday party when you bring a growler of fresh craft beer!
#Cheers #Craftbeer #hoppyholidays
into the wild
We've come out of the haze of San Diego Beer Week and we have lots of stuff happening around here at the brewery! First up, we've added a bunch of new beers.
Stout Your Engines! a Rich American stout with an assertive hop character, but without the heaviness sometimes associated with bold stouts. The dark, roasted malt character finishes with chocolate and coffee notes.
Dork Squad, our American IPA. Dedicated to the beer geek in all of us, and to our overwhelming love for hop-forward beers. Brewed with healthy doses of Amarillo, Columbus, Centennial, and Cascade, this beer has a well-rounded American hop aroma and flavor that won’t quit.
Absolutely!, An American amber ale, super approachable and drinkable at 6.0%. Brewed with light additions of Amarillo, Centennial, and Cascade hops, this beer’s caramel malt character is not overwhelming. Absolutely! pairs beautifully with just about anything on the menu.
'Tis the Sasion, a straw colored, light-bodied, and refreshing beer. Subtle notes of spice are present in both the aroma and flavor, creating a beer that is great for food pairing. The signature Belgian yeast strain helps create a beer with terrific depth of flavor for its delicate mouth feel and light body.
Most recently Rye Not? Our first Rye Pale Ale, Rye Not?, uses Amarillo, Chinook, Centennial and Cascade hops to balance out this easy drinking beer that is perfect for sitting around a campfire telling ghost stories. Try this beer with the Bagby Burger or the Smoked Chicken Club.
Over the past weekend we opened our long awaited tasting room and started our growler filling program. We have plenty of 2L amber swing top growlers for you to take home your favorite Bagby Beers to share with friends and loved ones, or hang here and make your way through a few tasters of our beers.
Cheers!
SAN DIEGO BEER WEEK 2014
Friday 11.07.2014
Come join us at 5:00 at Churchill's in San Marcos for Freshman Friday with our friends from Artifex and Toolbox Brewing.
Saturday 11.08.2014
We'll be at two festivals, click the links below for ticketing and location info:
Shelton Brothers Festival - Some of the world’s greatest and smallest artisanal beer, cider, and mead makers will join us to meet festival attendees and share their stories and knowledge. You’d have to spend months and countless dollars for a chance to meet this many world-class brewers. We’ve saved you the trouble and the expense — they’ll all be on hand personally to talk about their work and to pour for you. And many will be creating special brews specifically for the event — you won’t be able to find them anywhere else!
San Diego Guild Fest - Rub elbows with some of San Diego’s award-winning brewers and see why San Diego beer is taking over palates everywhere. This exclusive event will showcase San Diego’s finest, rare, and specialty beers from local breweries, including offerings brewed just for this event. All-inclusive ticket includes unlimited beer samples offered throughout the evening coupled with unlimited food samples from local craft-beer friendly restaurants.
Sunday 11.09.2014
Shelton Brothers Festival - Some of the world’s greatest and smallest artisanal beer, cider, and mead makers will join us to meet festival attendees and share their stories and knowledge. You’d have to spend months and countless dollars for a chance to meet this many world-class brewers. We’ve saved you the trouble and the expense — they’ll all be on hand personally to talk about their work and to pour for you. And many will be creating special brews specifically for the event — you won’t be able to find them anywhere else!
Monday 11.10.2104
Stone Brewing Brewmaster Lunch - Join us for lunch with Jeff, Stone Prez & Co-founder Steve Wagner, and Stone Brewmaster Mitch Steele and enjoy an amazing Asian-themed feast of incredible food and very special beers from both breweries!
Sunday 11.16.2104
Beer Garden at Torrey Pines - There is no better setting for the closing event of San Diego Beer Week than on the Arroyo Terrace of the Lodge at Torrey Pines. The Beer Garden brings together the best of San Diego’s breweries and local chefs to celebrate the craft beer movement. With 24 breweries and 12 chefs, Beer Garden is a truly unique and delicious beer and food pairing event. Each admission includes a commemorative taster glass and unlimited beer and food pairing samples.
And of course, if you can't make it to any of these events we'll be pouring beer and serving up food at the brewpub all weekend.
Cheers!
Wet Hop Beers!
Recently we added three new beers to the Bagby Beer line up that were brewed using only fresh, full cone hops, aka "wet hops". Hop harvest happens once a year in the Pacific Northwest (Washington, Oregon, and Idaho). It can start as early as mid-August and can last until as late as early October, it all depends on Mother Nature. Over the years, craft brewers have become more and more connected to the process of hop growing. Brewers from all over are visiting hop growing regions to visit farms and speak directly with farmers about the hop industry and it’s relationship with craft brewing. Hop farming is a very unique and difficult industry that has a direct effect on what beer drinkers are tasting in their glasses. The difficult and exciting time that is the hop harvest is at a close. We here at the Bagby Beer Company took full advantage of what only harvest time can produce – WET HOP BEER!!
So, what is a wet hop beer and what is the significance of it?
The process of hop harvest involves getting all of the hop cones (actually flowers) off of their long tall vines, drying them, and then bailing them. This of course is a very brief description of the process. The drying process reduces the moisture content in the hop flowers down to about 9 to 10 percent. The hops spend time in a giant kiln where hot air is moved through them. This way the hops are somewhat preserved and brewers can get nice fully aromatic and powerful hops all year around.
Wet hops skip this drying process all together they get pulled from the vines and then are shipped directly to breweries. These hops are not bailed or processed in any way they are at their full moisture content and come in boxes or bags directly to the brewery. Because they haven’t gone through the kilning process, these hops can have very exotic aromas and flavors. These hops are expensive because they take up much more space, they are very delicate, and have to be shipped cold and as fast as possible. Timing is everything for these hops and their use in beer. If the hops are not used right after picking, they will start to turn and create negative aromas and flavors.
We only get the chance to use these hops once a year. We are at the mercy of when they are ready to be picked and shipped down to us, which makes planning the brew days difficult. Although extremely difficult to work, wet hops smell fantastic and are worth every bit of all of the hard work. Each and every time we make a wet hop beer it will be different than any other we’ve made since the hops change each year. Even if we were able to use the same hop varieties, from year to year, different variables such as weather, moisture, soil and blooming time can impact the hops makeup. They may have different aromas and/or flavors next time around. These hops have not been field tested by the lab so we have no way of knowing how strong or how light their bittering power may be. Part of the fun of brewing wet hop beer is that you never really know what you are going to get. Wet hop beers are much more popular than they used to be, especially on the west coast. We are close to some of the best hop growing regions in the world
One thing that is also somewhat different from some other breweries is that we used 100% wet hops on all three of these brews. Some brewers will supplement their wet hop beers with regular kilned hops. We went for straight 100% wet hops for all three batches. Another thing to know is that some breweries call these beers “green hopped beers” or “fresh hop beers.” We call them wet hop beers because the hops that they are made with have their full moisture content and are therefore “wet” in comparison. All hops are green and any hops a brewer uses should be fresh so we go with wet hop for a description of these beers.
So, on to the actual beers!
Hop Crop Extra Pale – 100% wet hopped American extra pale ale. 4.8% abv. This beer is served on nitrogen which slightly softens the bite on palate and brings out more of the flavor of the hops rather than the bitterness. This was brewed with Cascade hops from Van Horn Farms.
Hop Crop Pale Ale – 100% wet hopped American pale ale. 5.9% abv. The hops used in this beer were Simcoe from the BT Loftus Ranches and Cascade from Van Horn Farms. We used a great amount of both of these hops in this brew so it has a very strong aroma and actually quite a bit of bitterness. Some of the bitterness lingers on your palate for a little while.
Hop Crop Red Ale – 100% wet hopped American red ale. 5.9% abv. This beer was brewed with Centennial hops from Van Horn Farms. It has a solid crystal/caramel malt flavor along with some crazy hops flavors. There are some earthy notes along with some pine and citrus. This one is unique for sure.
All three of these beers are on tap now and once they are gone they are gone for good!
Cheers!
Zwanze Day Details!
Check out all the details here
Zwanze Day!
We here at Bagby Beer are beyond honored and excited to be part of Zwanze Day on September 20, 2014! Mark the date on your calendar, we'll update the event details soon!
Getting there.
Most Oceanside residents will know that the location we chose to open Bagby Beer was at one point a used car dealership that specialized in SAAB and BMW. What most may not know is that this location also served as a hard-to-find-parts store that supported import car enthusiasts all over Southern California. To this day, nearly two years later, folks will come by looking for a rare '72 BMW something or other. When we chose this location we tried to preserve and recycle what we could for numerous reasons. The auto shop had hundreds of feet of shelf space housing all those parts and we couldn't dream of trashing all that wood. So instead we cleaned and recycled most of it for paneling throughout Bagby. You'll find this reclaimed wood in both the upstairs and downstairs bars, on the wall in the deck area outside of the tasting room and also, as it was initially purposed, serving as a shelf along the opening to the brew house where you'll be able to rest your beer while hanging in the garden and watch the brewers do their thing.
Cheers!
