Rye Imperial Stout - Experiment #1

Bottles of Rye Imperial Stout. 

Hand bottling 22 ounces of beer is a very time consuming process (even with Blichmann's BeerGun) it takes 1 minute 34 seconds to fill and cap each bottle on average. One of those $1,000,000 bottling lines is looking more and more enticing. We are probably just going to be filling kegs in the beginning anyways, so it wouldn't make too much sense. Plus, I don't have a million dollars laying around.

Appearance: Dark, almost jet black and turns a shade of coffee around the edges. It has thick, tan, bubbly head.

Aroma: Complex with a good amount of rye and hops.

Flavor: Many different flavors, standouts are dark chocolate, coffee, caramel, and toasted rye malt. Not aggressively alcoholic, but you can tell it is 7.9%ABV.

Mouthfeel: Full-bodied and moderately carbonated. This beer is thick, but not syrupy.

Overall: A very big dark intense beer.

We are still designing our logo/labels and creating a REAL LIVE WEBSITE at the moment. We are meeting with Mr. Patton on Friday to discuss this in greater detail.

I've also been discussing purchasing a used cold room from Phoenix, AZ with a man ominously/awesomely named Iron King. I'll keep you all updated on that as I find out more info, but I have to imagine that Iron King looks something like this.

All 60 Stouts in the Fridge.

Whoa, Whoa, Whoa... BOE, TTB, DEH.

Glad to say we are finally getting our TTB paperwork out the door. We had to wait for our Seller's Permit to get approved, which ended up being a ridiculously tedious process thanks to some incorrect advice given by the Board of Equalization, they told us we could send the paperwork to the Sacramento Office along with our excise tax paperwork, but it turned out that the Seller's Permit is a local thing. So, that had to be transfered to the San Diego branch, which the Sacramento branch told us they did. The next day we got a "Notice to Appear" from the San Diego branch telling us they had not received our Seller's Permit paperwork. We gave them a call and explained the situation, BUT they said we would probably end up having to resubmit the paper anyways. That did not make too much sense to us, so we called the Sacramento branch confirming that our paperwork had in fact been sent to the SD branch. So the waiting game began...

We called them a couple of times, but they never seemed to get the paperwork in the mail, until one day it mysteriously appeared on a desk a few cubicles over. Huzzah! Unfortunately due to a clerical error from several years ago, the Social Security number associated with our account was incorrectly typed. So they had to send us back the paper work and we had to provide proof that our SSN was the one we provided. A couple of tax statements later we were in business. Sent it back in the mail and waited again...

We called them a couple of times, but they never seemed to get the paperwork in the mail, until one day we received our Seller's Permit in the mail. Huzzah! With our Seller's Permit finally in hand I was able to mail off both our Department of Environmental Health planning application and the application for our TTB account!

With these in the works it is really only a matter of time before we are selling some artisanal ales around here.