Grand Lake Farmers Market in Oakland, CA has proven to be invaluable in us acquiring fantastic fruit for small batch experimentation. I was recently there to pick up some special peaches and pluots for a few 3 gallon experiments. I found myself getting lost... distracted by the great weather, colorful fruits, and the fantastic vegetables. I was reminded how lucky I am to live in California where we have access to such wonderful produce.

I was recently told by a lambic blender I know that I make more stickers and buttons than I do beer. He wasn’t intending to be hurtful, just honest. I realized he wasn’t wrong, and I started to feel some self doubt about what AltBrau is and where it’s going.

Sometimes you have to “fake it till you make it” in this world...

If you’ve been following along with us on Instagram and Facebook (FYI… we update those a lot more than we do our website), you’ll see we have been keeping busy. We recently poured our beer for the 2nd year in a row at the wonderful Carnivale Brettanomyces in Amsterdam, joined in on another brewing session with the Jacobs brothers in Belgium at Antidoot Wilde Fermenten, and had a collab released at the annual rare beer auction/beer festival Brews For New Avenues in Portland.

Despite all this… we still struggle with finding ourselves much in the same place as we were this time last year. Is AltBrau moving forward? Did our crowdfunding campaign allow us to progress? Where are we going? Let’s save all that for the next blog post and get you caught up with whats going on…

Our friends at Good Beer Hunting have featured one of our photos from our recent trip to Europe in the B-Roll section of their website. The team at GBH are responsible for some of our absolute favorite content covering the world of beer. We are honored to have a contribution of our own up on their site.

SevenStills is as much (if not much more so) known for their clean fermented IPA’s so we could not risk a contamination. I was willing to give kettle souring a shot since I had not tried it before. However, I wanted to create something complex. Rylan and his team were up to the challenge.

For six months we built our email list via our pre-launch page, researched trends in crowdfunding, organized brewing/blending collaborations, collected contacts for press releases, brainstormed with videographers, worked with merchandise vendors, and so on and so on.

When the time came to click the launch button, I knew I had already gone too far to turn back. I also knew I had organized and planned the execution of our campaign to the best of my ability. We launched to the public on August 6th.

We are excited to announce we have kicked off our crowdfunding campaign with Indiegogo.com! Check out our campaign page and all the rewards we've set up. Be sure to share our page on Facebook, and Instagram, and Twitter.

Every year, a 5 mile stretch of Amsterdam is invaded by a thirsty gaggle of funky brewers and blenders from around the world. Local breweries and craft bars become classrooms with overhead projectors, their buildings filled to standing room only by dedicated beer nerds.