Brandon’s Blog

Big Coolship batch 1

So after months of waiting our custom built coolship finally arrived on February 21st! I have been extremely excited about adding this piece of equipment to the ETF program since I made our first 100% Spontaneously fermented beer back in 2012. “Clarence” was the name of that beer and despite only making about 15 gallons…

Crowd Sourced Collab w/ The Rare Barrel

Hey folks! I am very excited to announce that Jay Goodwin of The Rare Barrel and I have cooked up a crazy idea: Crowd Source a Sour Beer to be brewed and sold! Yes this is a beer YOU can be directly involved in creating! He and I have 2 great platforms to educate and…

My $40 Barrel Washer

One question I get asked a lot is how I clean our barrels and how much cleaning I actually do after aging a beer. I’ll start off with the second question first…truth is I don’t do much cleaning to the barrels after aging. We try to refill our barrels with a new beer within a…

Barrel Head Removal

There are times when using barrels or wooden casks in your beer program will require you to remove the “head” of the barrel. It could be for something as simple as removing large whole fruit that won’t easily drain out through the bung hole, to remove Potassium Bitartrate / Wine Crystals or for repair purposes….

Microbe fun!

I’m still here and having more fun than ever. Recently I’ve been able to mess around with some small batch brews again! Mostly it’s for research and to prop up some new microbes for larger batch use, but hey we do get some beer out if it! 2 new ones I kicked off last week…

4 years later here we are…

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS POST! Disclaimer of poor grammar and misspellings* WordPress tells me via a Congrats email with some sweet graphics and a bill for web hosting that embracethefunk.com is 4 years old. I’m reflecting on my time as a television director moving entirely into brewing and lucky enough to have an unusual glass holder….

So what’s up?

I’ve had a lot of emails, Tweets and in person questions over the past few months about what’s up with this website? When are you going to update it again? Let me start by saying I appreciate those questions and everyone’s desire for more content! So what is going on with Embrace The Funk? Well…

BrettaNOmyces?

This is a tricky post for me to write, but being that I have a background in TV News I do think this is a story that professional brewers and home brewers need to be aware of. Is WLP644 Brettanomyces Trois actually Brettanoymces? This is a question that was raised in a discussion group I…

Teaming Up With Vintage Barrels

In 2011 I wrote about a special beer I brewed called Lil Nugget. It is still one of my favorite homebrews and is holding up pretty well. Since I started at Yazoo it has always been in the back of my mind to brew this one on a commercial scale. Fast forward to January 2014 when…

Barrel Cleaning and Storage

In December I wrote about tips on barrel repairs and maintenance. I was happy to hear the tips in the article had helped a few of my fellow brewers! A few weeks ago I was scrolling through some posts on a forum and came across a thread on barrel cleaning. Chase Healey of Prairie Artisan Ales made…