Hey all,
I am a Co-Founder/Brewer at Night Shift. Didn't know this forum existed until I saw a link on
FujOnTap facebook today. Most of the thread is a bit old but I wanted to follow up and answer any and all questions you have about our beers.
Just a few general response comments:
- We never put out bad infected beer on purpose. We are too small of a business to risk losing costumers due to subpar beers. We have dumped and will continue to dump beer that does not taste to our standards.
- We are always learning and by no means are perfect. Our processes combined with our yeast/bacteria culture took a nose dive for a few months in 2013. A combo of a super funky culture and open fermenters lead some berliners to get pretty freaking acidic. Some we caught before we bottled and dumped, others we caught too late and needed to be recalled/refunded. We have changed our berliner weisse culture to something we have way more control over. We stopped using open fermenters and switched to all stainless tanks and along with many other changes our berliners have improved. Cape Codder this year is on par with how our berliners will taste going forward. Subtle lactic tartness, wheaty and with nice fruity flavors and all super crushable.
- A lot of our beers are weird. We like weird beers and everyone has different taste buds. Not all of our beers are to everyone's liking, we are cool with that. But will continue to explore and push the flavor profiles that exist in beer. As mush as I love a good pale ale or IPA they just don't excite me/us the same way a beer like Funky Buddha's Lemon Meringue berliner does. Thus we try to brew more weird beers.
- That being said we are brewing more hoppy beers than ever before and hope you give them a shot. We think they are super tasty. Many are using American Ale yeast and sexy hops like Mosiac, Nelson, Citra, Amarillo and so forth.
- We love Beliners. We love them so much we have even had many conversations about switching over to become a 100% berliner brewery. But at our current size we would go out of business unless we charged a **** ton more for them. They take significantly longer to make then a regular beer and usually are way more labor intensive (hours of chopping fruit). As we grow we plan on brewing a greater percentage of berliners.
- We are humbled by the support of our Barrel Society members. We put a lot of time, effort, and thought into creating the beers each year. The cash flow from members has helped us grow and produce beers we couldn't afford to do with out help. Although, it doesn't seem like their was much love for last year's releases (at least in this forum) we sold triple the number of memberships this year. Looking forward to sharing beers like our blended Aurora (first release of 2014), prickly pear berliner, passion fruit saison, 100% Brett DIPA brewed with Galaxy, and so forth with this years members. Thanks for taking the chance and supporting our growth and creative process!
I know I am biased but Art #18 and Whirlpool (brewed with Mosaic and AU Summer) are both beers that we are really proud of and think they are some of our best yet.
As mentioned above, feel free to fire back any questions and please do keep any and all feedback coming.
Cheers,
Rob
Great to see you on here, Rob. Hope you understand all of my criticisms, at least, are meant to be constructive- I know I am snarky sometimes but it's always intended to be in a loving way. I think you guys are an important part of the Boston beer community and I am excited to see you continue to grow. Taking chances is cool, and I really do like that your business model, however you've set it up, appears to be able to support taking serious chances, brewing really out there beers, etc. I think, perhaps, that a few of the beers you have released are perhaps ones that a more anal-retentive brewer might have dumped or chosen not to brew after the pilot batch stage - but c'est la vie. I think to some degree, I suffer from "Hill Farmstead Syndrome", where if
every beer a brewery makes isn't awesome, I find something to nitpick. And it's not like I don't find things to nitpick about HFS either. It's true that a good number of beers you guys have made, I've been pretty negative about, but I think I am positive about a similar number.
Glad to hear that issues with the berliner culture may have/have been resolved - I had no issue with pounding all my fruited ones immediately after purchase, but it's especially nice in the trading community to be able to send a bottle over to someone even a few months after release and not have to worry that it'll have taken a nosedive.
May I humbly suggest/request that you brew and release an unfruited/unspiced berliner this summer? You guys like cool/weird things - I think an unfruited berliner would be awesome in cans for the summer, even more so if you find some local partner to produce syrup(s) to go with. NEBCO's Weiss Trash was one of my favorite summer beers last year- the format/season just are perfect together. Even if it was growler only, I would enjoy as well. And perhaps this reduces the labor load, for that batch at least.
I was less than satisfied with the
beers from the 2013 Barrel Society, but that doesn't mean I regret my purchase - I don't at all. I kind of expected what I got, actually - you guys are a young brewery doing a lot of risky things, and I didn't expect every beer to be a home run. I was very happy to give you my money to support your growth. To be perfectly honest, 99% of the reason I didn't reup for 2014 is because all of my favorite beers you guys have made were non-barrel society beers, and with the exception of Bean Porter, they were also all not barrel aged. I still look forward to tasting this year's beers and I'll be back again next year if it heads in a direction I'm interested in stylistically.
Cheers and hope you stick around here!
