We’re having our Fall Open House, just in time for Halloween.  But it’s not just about good times, it’s about BEER!  We’re debuting our next seasonal, HOOLIGAN Hoppy Irish Red, so get psyched.  Five of your favorite food trucks will be there to help whet your appetite as well, including Peached Tortilla, Chi’Lantro BBQ, Be More Pacific, The Evil Wiener and The Jalopy.  Yes, FIVE Food Trucks!  Don’t forget to dress up, as costumes are strongly encouraged.  Should be an awesome time, a great way to close down Austin Beer Week and kick off Halloween weekend!  Be sure to RSVP to the Facebook event.

We’re opening up the brewery to release our 4th brew, the EPIC Hop Bock, our Hoppy Blonde Bock Lager, into the wild. Peached Tortilla will be slinging their finest cuisine. Swing by, grab a pint, and take a tour of the brewery. See you there. Cheers!  RSVP on Facebook.

Per TABC, we can’t tell you which bar we’re starting at or what bars we are planning on crawling to. We’re thinking 5-7 stops, ending on Rainey St, so there is going to be some serious crawling involved.

The event is free, except what you choose to drink at each stop.

RSVP to the Crawl on Facebook.

Sidenote: No one likes to wait to get a brew, so bring cash, it’ll speed up the ordering at each spot.

Hope to see you all there!

I know it’s way overdue, but here are the pics from our Grand Opening.  We had a blast and we hope the 733 beer lovers that came through did too.  We’re already thinking of when to do the next one, and will probably try to have another event to debut our next brew this summer.  We’ll keep you updated on when that will be and which brew.  Thanks again to all our friends, family, and volunteers, we couldn’t have done it without you.  Here are the pics:

Close to the Corner of Braker Ln and Kramer Ln, we’re located in a business park, just East of Mopac and if you’re coming from that direction, just past the Railroad tracks.  Exceptionally convenient for the Grand Opening, Cap Metro is running the light rail commuter line all day, so why drive when you can ride?  Here’s the link to the MetroRail schedule.  Here’s a map, modified of course, and the Google Maps link as well.  Can’t wait to see you all there.

Mark your calendars and tell your friends.  We’ll be opening up the brewery for tours, brews, and some good times on March 12th.  The momentous occasion will commence at 2PM and the beer will flow until 6PM, giving all you movie buffs plenty of time to get back to the SXSW Film events.  We’ll be rocking the standard three free samples of our tasty brews, but if you buy a jazzy $10 pint glass, you can fill that bad boy to the brim instead.  We’ll be hooking up some local food trailers, so you’ll have something to munch on between brews.  See you then!

We got just under 10,000 more lbs of grain and we’re ready to do some serious brewing.  More batches of ENVY and BLUR are lined up, as thirsty Austinites are drinking it all up.  Brewing the NIGHTLIGHT Irish Stout today, so Paddy’s Day, get ready.

I know, I know.  I’ve been a little lax with the blog entries.  I’ll try to do better, promise.  But enough of that.  We are proud and excited beyond all belief to announce that we’ll be selling our first kegs of BLUR Texas Hefe today, Thursday, Jan 20th!   Oh yeah.  We’ve been waiting for this day for a long time now and it is finally here.  We hope you feel the same way…

We’ll only be on in a handful of choice establishments for this limited initial release for the weekend.  In the meantime, we’ll be preparing our ENVY Amber to rock the Austin Beer Scene starting next week.  So keep an eye out next week, as we will begin a wide release of our first two beers.

Now, by law, we can’t tell you where it is being sold, so you’ll have to either search it out on your own or do some digging.  I found this article on Liquid Austin to be enlightening.  Hopefully, this knowledge won’t stop all of you from going to all your favorite bars and demanding Circle Brews on tap IMMEDIATELY.

Well, get out there already and finally get your hands on a Circle Brew…

You can only imagine our excitement ramping up to the first brew day.  It was epic.  Having spent the last three years building steadily to this point, I would be lying if I didn’t say that we were nervous as hell.  All-in-all, it was a great day, albeit a very long one.  It was rocky at times, but we came through it alive and with 30 BBLs of Envy Amber fermenting away in the tank.  If that isn’t success, I don’t know what is.

Whenever we could, we were snapping pictures and taking videos(I’ll upload those later).  I’ll try to walk you through the day, so the pictures will make a little more sense.  We started late, around noon(we’d been testing and tweaking the system until after 5 am the night before).  We had milled the grain, about 1700 lbs or so, the night before.  The milled grain was stored in our grist case, ready and waiting.  We began by heating up the brew water in the kettle, to get it to the proper temperature to mix with the grain, aka Mashing-in.  When that was complete, the grain was pushed through our auger and mixed with the hot water at the right temp.  It’s a little trickier than it sounds, as you need to mix hot and cold the water through the U to get to the right temp that mixes with the grain through the hydrator, which will then lower the temp even further to the perfect mash temp as it falls into and mixes in the Mash Tun.  It took some getting used to, with various flow rates of the hot and cold water and the grain speed, but we got it dialed in fairly quickly.

As we mashed in, our brewery rake mixed the grain slowly, and we adjusted the temp and quantity of water to again ensure the right temp as well as mash consistency.  This process took us about an hour.  After all the grain is in the Mash Tun, we allowed it to sit for an hour and a half, extracting all the sugars and flavors from the grain.  When this Mash Rest was complete, we began a process called Vorlaufing, which essentially cycles the concentrated sugar water, or wort, back through its own grain bed.  After about 20 minutes of Vorlaufing, the wort cleared up significantly(which you can see through the sight glass), as much of the particulates were filtered through the grain bed.  At this stage, everything had gone quite smoothly and we were beginning to relax a bit.

After Vorlaufing, we begain pulling off the wort into the kettle.  During this time we began sparging more hot water through the grain to extract as much of the sugars as we could until we had the volume of wort we needed to start the boil(around 37 BBLs).  We went slowly, so as not to pull a suction and suck particulates from the grain bed into the kettle.  Our steam boiler surprised us by being able to bring the wort to a boil faster than we could pull it off, which is always nice.

After we hit the target volume and the boil was dialed in, we began adding our hops at the appropriate increments throughout the 90 minute boil to impart bittering, flavors, and aromas.  It’s definitely fun to throw pounds and pounds of hops into 30 BBLS of boiling beer.

With the boil complete, we began whirlpooling the brew in the kettle, spinning it around to let the remaining particulates and hops settle in the middle.  We then started pulling off the beer and pumping it through our heat exchanger to cool it down to fermentation temps, aka Knockout.  From there, it was sent to the fermenter, where it mixed with the yeast.  This part was the one minor hiccup, as our two-stage heat exchanger slowed the knockout down a bit.  We found the cause, one of our stages, the cold water side, kept forming air pockets inside the heat exchanger and wasn’t transferring heat properly enough.  We ended up going very slowly, but got that Envy in the tank!

At this point, it was about 2 in the morning.  We had yet to take the spent grain out of the Mash Tun, aka Mashing Out.  The grain had solidified, so our rake motor couldn’t push it out through the chute.  So, we had to jump into the steamy Mash Tun and push out 1700 lbs of hot, wet grain by hand.  Who says brewing isn’t fun?  All that was left after that was cleaning up the brewhouse, running cleaning loops and squeegeeing up the floor.  We were done at 5am and that was the end of the beginning of Circle Brewing.