1. On February 20, 2012, Steven Sorrell become a Cicerone Certified Beer Server through the Cicerone program. If you are not familiar with this program, feel free to check out their website (www.cicerone.org) for more information. We felt that this was a great addition for our program.

2. We are still picking up new merchandise and working on our online shop. For beer glasses, we have a logo shaker glass available, which will be one of our standard offerings, and a weizen glass which will be a limited release. We will be offering two types of stickers, the Low Brau Brewery vinyl and the logo vinyl. We have a logo bottle speed openers, just added patches, and are working on t-shirts. We hope to have all of this available online shortly, and if you are interested before that happens, please feel free to contact us.

3.  We have started planting a couple of rhizomes of Hallertau in our garden and Tettnang in our neighbors garden.  Though the first year probably won’t yield much, we are looking forward to future harvests to be used for limited special releases.

4.  Testing continues on our Totten Bock, and we have looked at other possible flagship beers.  Another possibility that we are bringing into testing is a raspberry wheat.  We will have some photos of our test batching process here shortly, and will also be able to elaborate more on what these beers aim to be.  We are looking into the possibility of having a sampling of these and Heidi Weiss as home brews sometime soon, so that everyone can see which direction we are heading in.

5.  We also have another large project, which will be more along the marketing lines, but exciting none the less.  We hope to document this project and be able to share it with everyone else.

1.  We are currently still trying to find a space in North East.  Our broker is Menkiti Group, and we have already viewed a few locations.  It appears that since we are looking for such a small space, there are less options available.  We continue looking however, and once that is complete, we will order the equipment and get the ball rolling on permits.

2.  While we are waiting on the space, we have been working on more merchandise.  Currently we have vinyl stickers and speed openers.  We had an order of glasses (the glass you see on this website) end up being not of the greatest quality, and may offer those as an limited release with a discounted price.  We do have another batch of much better glasses coming soon however.  Also, we are working on t-shirts.  Once the t-shirts and new glasses arrive, we will add the shop to the website.

3.  In addition, we are more importantly creating test batches for some of the other beers will be running.  We still want to finalize the Totten Bock and directions that some of the other beers will head.

Prost!

Low Brau recently had the opportunity to stop by and visit Hess Brewing in San Diego, CA.  If you aren’t familiar with Hess, they are a well established nano-brewery on the west coast, and in fact, is San Diego’s first licensed nano-brewery.  Many suggest that nano-breweries cannot survive in the brewery world, due to the economies of scale, but Hess has proven them wrong and is very successful.

During our visit, we had to make sure we tried their flight (ten different beers on tap) and grabbed another beer or two afterwards talking shop and beer with Michael Skubic and blogger Baltimore Beer Guy.  There was quite the range sytlewise and plenty of flavor, showing what is possible with hard work (Hess has a 1.6 BBL brewing setup) and passion.  We were also delightfully surprised that the growler of coffee porter made it through the flight.

It was great to see their set up and to experience all of their beer.  It also provided further inspiration and excitement for things to come here at Low Brau.

http://hessbrewing.com/

http://www.baltimorebeerguy.com/