Omnivore - Cherry Street planning bottles and cans, more sours and barrel aging

• CL File
• Cherry Street Brewing’s Nick Tanner

On Tuesday, Cherry Street Brewing Cooperative founder Nick Tanner did an AMA (Ask Me Anything) session with Atlanta beer subreddit, ATLbeer. Amidst questions about Tenacious D and “Clubber Lang crush-mode Rocky,” Tanner revealed a number of newsy tidbits about his quickly expanding Cumming brewpub that recently turned two years old.

Here’s the rundown:

• Cherry Street will be taking advantage of the lone brewpub benefit of the forthcoming SB 63 provisions: the newfound ability to produced packaged beer. “As soon as Governor Nathan Deal signs the bill or lets it go through, you will see high end specialty releases from Cherry Street at beer bars and package stores,” Tanner wrote. “We will focus on our higher alcohol, specialty beers at first. Next year, I will look at canning.”

• “If all goes well, Shutdown Stout will be our first bottle release,” Tanner wrote of his bottling plans. And when Cherry Street gets around to aluminum, he plans to use a mobile canning service initially. “I talked with Second Self who recently used a mobile canning line and they said they had less than 12 low fill cans on 40 BBLs,” Tanner wrote. “That is a damn good error rate.”

• Multiple Redditors praised Cherry Street’s Chief Sawnee’s Stash Coconut Porter. One even asked for help homebrewing with coconut. Tanner was happy to oblige. “My recommendation is to use unsweetened coconut and toast it,” he advised. “That will release the oils. We add our coconut in secondary fermentation for about 5 days.”

• Cherry Street is working on collaboration beers with Wrecking Bar Brewpub, Eventide Brewing, and, Tanner says, “a couple others I will wait to mention.”

• The brewpub currently has “like 5 different sours sitting in barrels right now.” And Tanner’s focus, at the moment, is barrel-aging. “My goal is to have at least 7 different barrel beers on draft,” he wrote.