Writer: Jamil Zainasheff

I’m not sure exactly what I was thinking, but somehow I had this idea in my head that I’d take all my risk up front in getting Heretic off the ground and once it was past a certain point, there would be a lot less
risk. Ah, poor, simple fool.

“A barrel full of certainties won’t roll very far.” – Gerd de Ley
From the beginning, I was certain that we would make barrel-aged beers at Heretic. We are close to Napa so it is easy to obtain used wine barrels and I really like the interesting character that develops from aging beer in a barrel.

A reader asked me, “At what point does someone have enough knowledge to become a [professional] brewer?

The current craft beer market is booming. Passionate beer lovers seek out new beers and are willing to pay a premium price for new experiences.

Before we sold our first kegs of beer, I spent a tremendous amount of time investigating what similar products were selling for in our markets. I wrote about this in an earlier post, about the need to be careful
about under or overpricing your product for a given market.

We’ve finally gotten onto a rhythm in our brewing and bottling.

Float is that portion of your kegs that are out in the market. Generally, the number of kegs you need for every tap handle you want to support is somewhere around three or four.

So, one year of entries down. Normally I need to think long and hard about committing to another year of writing anything, but this writing is different for me. I get to say just about anything I want. I get to ramble on about random thoughts, and as long as the topic somehow relates to beer, everyone seems to be OK with it. Cool gig, huh?

Over the past year or so I’ve lost five friends. About one every two or three months and it sucks. I don’t want to bring you down, but every so often I think about those friends and what they meant to me.

"The three-martini lunch is the epitome of American efficiency. Where else can you get an earful, a bellyful and a snootful at the same time?" — President Gerald R Ford

People who have known me as a homebrewer for a long time often ask me what I think of professional brewing.