Omnivore - Creature Comforts readies first cans and bottles for November
New formats of the Athens beer coming soon
Fresh off their win a couple weeks ago at the Great American Beer Festival in Denver, Creature Comforts Brewing Co. in Athens will fittingly release the winning beer as one of their first packaged offerings. After learning that a couple other breweries already had “Curiosity Series,” CCBC renamed their limited line of beers. The Curious No. 2 is the new name of CCBC’s bronze-medal-winning American Brett Ale with kiwi and pineapple that will see an extremely limited release (200 bottles) in Athens in early-to-mid November.
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Another bottle releasing alongside Curious No. 2 but with a substantially larger footprint is Southerly Love. A tart, wild ale kettle soured with lactobacillus, dry hopped with Amarillo and Simcoe hops, and fermented with Brettanomyces, the beer is a collaboration with Dunedin, Fla.’s 7venth Sun Brewery. The pair brewed Southerly Love on June 21 at CCBC, and celebrated by pouring both breweries’ offering in Athens that weekend. There will be 2,000 bottles of Southerly Love distributed to the Athens and Atlanta areas in early-to-mid November.
The two breweries have a friendship that stretches back several years, before either of them existed, when CCBC’s Adam Beauchamp and 7venth Sun’s Justin Stange worked at SweetWater Brewing Company together. CCBC brewer Blake Tyers says the collaboration goes beyond friendship, though.
“We really respect what the guys down at 7venth Sun are doing with their beer,” he says. “Even before we opened, they were helping us dial in our Berliner Weisse technique and answering any questions we had. They make great beer with an innovative flair and I feel like we share similar visions for our beer. We’re planning a trip down to Dunedin to brew another collaboration with them at their place in January.”
Following those two limited releases, the year-round canned versions of half of CCBC’s core lineup will launch in November. Tropicalia (an IPA in the west coast U.S. style) and Athena (a light, refreshing German style called Berliner Weisse) will come first, complete with a Nov. 10 release party at the Georgia Theatre. (Tyers says Reclaimed Rye cans will come in the winter, and Bibo cans will come closer to springtime.)
“The Georgia Theatre is a staple to the Athens community,” Tyers says. “We’ve all been to shows since we opened and wished we could be drinking our beer while watching a band, but they don’t have draft beer in the main venue area. Now that we have cans coming it was an obvious choice.”
The brewery also just celebrated six months. CEO Chris Herron took to the CCBC blog to touch on what they’ve accomplished in half a year, from recipe tweaks to staffwide Cicerone exams to more general quality control processes. He also invokes the god Andre 3000, in what amounts to a love letter of sorts to his company and its fans.
Meanwhile, CCBC looks forward. In addition to rolling out a few new spins on core drafts (a dry hopped Athena and a coffee-treated Reclaimed Rye, for starters) in the coming month, the brewery has more specialty beers on the way as well. They just brewed a Grisette using local raw wheat from DaySpring Farms in Danielsville, which Tyers says will be bottled when it’s ready. Same goes for The Curious #3, a 100% Brett Reclaimed Rye aged in Willet Bourbon barrels with blackberries. CCBC really loves Brett. You might say it keeps them curious.
“We kind of have a split personality in our brewery,” Tyers says. “We have the big brewery side with aspirations of growing into a great regional brewery by producing our take on classic, timeless beers that you’d find in six packs. On the other side, we’ve got this curious, little brewery mentality where we like to experiment and play with mixed culture fermentations and nearly-forgotten styles. Brett is a very cool yeast genus, and the different species/sub-species can offer so many unique flavors with reactions to different raw ingredients and techniques. Overall, I think we just love the elegance the yeast can offer.”