It took more than a year of planning and testing but Brooklyn Brewery has begun distributing the first beer packaged using its new bottling line and warm room.

Other Brooklyn beers sold in bottles are brewed at F.X. Matt in upstate Utica, while the beer brewed in Brooklyn previously was available only on tap. So rolling out Local 1 was not simply a matter of brewmaster Garrett Oliver writing another recipe. The beer itself is based on Fortitude, a previously sold on draft.

Oliver spent more than a year picking the right bottling line, getting it in place, designing a separate temperature-controlled warm room and running test batches. The whole project cost more than $300,000.

He knew going in that the bottles would be 750ml and finished with a cork and wire closure. He decided on the largest “still fill” bottler in the country, meaning sugar and yeast are added to beer that has virtually no C02 in it, then the beer is naturally carbonated in a warm room. Even in Belgium, most breweries add some C02 at bottling and before warm conditioning.

“We asked ourselves, ‘Are we going to do it old school or do it the modern way?’” Oliver said. “In the end, we thought we got more complexity (this way).”

Several small breweries in the United States are also taking the “old school” approach but their bottling operations are quite small - some even bottle by hand - and dedicated warm rooms are still rare.

Months before Local 1 hit the shelves he was already being asked about what the next beer bottled the same way might be.

“Right now there are no plans,” he said. “I tell people that every time I’m asked the question that I will delay the second beer by two months. I want to do this one thing for a year.”

And the “style” of this one?

“It is pretty much its own self,” Oliver said.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 19th, 2007 at 5:49 pm and is filed under American style. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.