Now that we’ve gotten some slight permitting issues out of the way, our construction team is in full swing and the fate of our building time table rests in mother natures hands for now. People usually pray for rain down here in the south but let’s hope it holds off a few weeks.

Here is a brief photo essay of where we’re at currently with our construction progress.

Tractors leveling dirt out

Overview of the site

Here is an upwards look at our ramp entrance on the side of our brewery.

 

The threshold for the building being dug out.

The threshold being fortified and awaiting concrete.

The building steel awaiting a concrete pad to sit atop.

Some concrete has already been poured.

The main plumbing trench awaiting pipes, drains, etc.

Here is a look at our outside terrace.

So where are those food trucks going to go?? The ramp silly! Imagine this tractor replaced with a food truck from the upstate’s growing new food segment. We will of course have to set up a little fence and gate and figure something minor details about where folks can carry their drinks when getting food, but we will have food more often than not at the brewery for tours and tasting

The food truck ramp at Brewery 85′s back beer garden.

We absolutely cannot wait to open up in the fall and we are busting our chops to give South Carolinians and folks in the upstate a place they can beat their chests about and be proud of.

 * We realize we are giving you guys and gals following the Hunt for Brewery 85 or #Hunt4B85 plenty of ammunition and tools to find us, but we ask that you please sit tight. If you’ve found us, that’s awesome! Please don’t spoil the contest for others. We will have an upcoming post about the grand finale and yes, you do have to find us but its not that important to actually winning the grand prize. We want to make things perfect for y’all when we are officially open and we need some privacy to get that done.

To our neighbors: Thanks so much for keeping our location quiet and we’ve got some surprises for you guys in mind. We’ll repay the favor.

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Greenville, SC, March 25, 2013– Grading will begin today on a 6.2 acre tract of land in preparation  for the 10,000 square foot brewing facility for Brewery 85, a brand new locally owned craft brewing company. The facility will be located near Interstate 85 in proximity to Laurens Road and the Clemson University ICAR Campus. The brewery will open operations with a 30BBL two vessel brewhouse built by the Criveller Group of Canada. The fermentation cellar will consist of four 60BBL unitanks, one 15BBL unitank, and one 60BBL brite tank. An open air, eight tap tasting room will greet customers at the entrance with an immediate view of the entire fermentation cellar and brewhouse.

“We are really excited to join the growing beer scene here in the South. We hope to provide beers that the people from our area can be proud of and enjoy. We also aim to provide our customers with an unparalleled experience when they visit our tasting room and production facility in the future.”

– Will McCameron, President

The exact location is still being publicly withheld because the brewery is hosting “The Hunt for Brewery 85” or #Hunt4B85 on their Facebook and Twitter accounts respectively. Each week participants can win glassware and other products. Grand prize winners of the contest at its culmination will receive a package including growler discounts, t-shirts, glassware sets, and two tickets to the grand opening set at a later date.

“Better Beer Starts Here.™”

# # #

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Long, long ago when we were all still home brewing Meredith and Will bought a little black Great Dane puppy to serve as a little brother to their Old English Bulldog named Buddy. The bulldog was three at the time and was considerably larger than the puppy but as our passion for brewing grew so did this little awkward tangle of skinny legs. I mean, this guy grew REAL fast as Great Dane’s naturally do and Buddy soon became the “older brother” as opposed to the “big brother” in no time.

The major reason that Great Danish landed in our year-round line up of beers is simply because it is Meredith’s favorite beer that we produce:

“Will’s masterful creation, Great Danish is one of my favorite beers that he brews. Let’s face it: I am a girl and I like a little more attention and that’s exactly what this beer calls for. If you have been following Will since the beginning of his home brewing career then you have probably had one if his first beers that he ever brewed and that was Buddy’s Brown. When he started shooting for a beer that I would enjoy (a beer with a Belgian yeast and malty goodness) we had just gotten our second dog, Scout. Buddy is loud, wild, and in your face and I love him because he reminds me of none other than Will McCameron. Scout is quiet, peaceful, and inquisitive and this reminds Will of myself. I am not saying we have favorites here but the saying ‘opposites attract’ is definitely true!”

Scout loves us unconditionally. So naturally we figured that one of the best ways we could ever repay him would be to create a beer named in honor of him. Hence: The Great Danish was born.

“Dogs teach us about faith, trust, and devotion. They teach us how to devotedly serve a higher master, how to attend and wait and how to let go of a drudge. But most of all, they teach us about the meaning and experience of unconditional love.” – Lama Surya Das, Dog is my Co-Pilot

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Just a quick note to check out this weeks Upstate Business Journal for an article covering the growing beer industry in our local area.

The article was written by our friend April Morris and it also features Quest Brewing Company, Thomas Creek Brewery, and RJ Rockers Brewery. Very informative stuff in this bad boy.

Fun time await us all in 2013! #BetterBeer Starts Here!

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YO… MAN. YEOM… EN… How do you… YEOW. MEN. YEOWZERS.

It look’s tough to say but with a little practice it’s no biggie.

You can pronounce it “yo-men” or “yeo-men” if you prefer. At least that’s how Will say’s it.

This is what the pronunciation looks like: /ˈyōmən/ … Duh, naturally. Psh. Here’s a helpful google setup about it where you can actually hear it.

In ye olde Britain, a Yeoman was a military/militia member or a guardsmen. But that’s not quite what we were shooting for here. So, why did we name our American Brown Ale after such an awkward word?

Well, Will is something of a history buff. Okay, nerd is a more proper description. Fine. Super dork. Upon further inspection you’ll find that the word yeoman was a term given to farmers and noblemen who settled the wild tracts of the interior South in the early days of America. These people were mainly Scottish/Irish immigrants. More so, these people were Will’s ancestors. These people were militiamen, farmers, warriors, settlers, and patriots. We figured it’d also be more meaningful than naming it something like “Farmer Brown Ale” or a cutesy, simple name that required zero thought.

The name also takes on more meaning than just the period of Southern settlement. Not only is this a nod to Will’s Scottish, Carolinian-settling ancestry but it’s also a nod to great Southerners who built the South, rebuilt the South both physically and culturally, and those that continue to push the South forward in this brave new age of technology and cultural reshaping.

As Southerners, we’ve been through a lot. Probably more than most in our great country. The term yeoman, for us, has many synonyms in the South. Settlers. Trail blazers. Cultural reformers. Brave men and women who made a stand in the face of adversity. People who rebuilt our region after the Civil War. Hardened folks who pushed through the depression and times of war. People who took a stand during the civil rights era and changed the way we think about things. Students, teachers, researchers, artists, businessmen and women who continue to drive our culture, industry, and growth in the South… These are our Yeomen.

This American Brown Ale is rich, dark, and complex. It is, in our minds, a hearty beer worthy of hard-working Southerners. There’s a common Southern proverb attributed to a few folks that we think personifies this beer and the statement we’re trying to make with it perfectly: ”Plow deeply, work hard, and be patient.”

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If you picked up a copy of The Upstate Business Journal this week, on page 21 you’d find a feature on our little brewery!

Give it a look see by clicking here.

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Ok Greenville, we want to play a game!

So here’s the skinny – oh, wait, by the way…

WE GOT OUR LOCATION TO BUILD!

We are now officially in the design process stage of opening up a new brewery. Why are we building? It actually turned out to be cheaper at this point than to go back into a pre-existing building and retrofitting it to be a brewery to our liking within our business model. Back to the main story – We want you to find us and become a little more familiar with Greenville in the process!

We’re going to rely heavily on our Twitter and Facebook accounts for this game. Essentially, we are going to tweet and post a pic to Facebook of a location around the metro Greenville area. Heck, we might even go big time and make it an upstate thing. It’ll be the same pic at roughly the same time on each service. The first to tweet back to us the location with a definitive answer will win a free Brewery 85 glass! ALSO, the first person to respond to the Facebook photo will ALSO win a free glass! No repeat winners and no double winners, sorry guys and gals.

These places could be local businesses that we like, local landmarks, or pieces of obscurity that are going to take some hunting and researching to figure out!

Let’s say we do this every Wednesday afternoon, huh? Here’s where we need your help to build our little social experiment though. We need you to tell your friends about our  Twitter and Facebook accounts and get them following. We’d like everyone to get a chance to get one of the first pieces of our free (and in some cases, the only style that we’ll ever produce of certain logos) glassware!

On Twitter, you just simply have to blast out a nice message about us and what we’re trying to do to all your friends OR retweet our original message about this post. Whatever you do, link this post! We’ll use the hashtag #Hunt4B85 so you should tag that too.

On Facebook, there’s a little bit of trickery involved so stick with us. Either share what we are doing by pasting the website address for this post into your timeline… OR… We’ll pay to promote our own post about this competition and to make things easy you can just share that post on your own timeline with your own editorial comments. Whatever you do, we need you to go to our page, click the little gear icon in the top right hand corner beneath the cover photo, scroll down and click “Add to Interests Lists…” This is because Facebook has changed how they do things one way or another. Anyways, if you don’t add us to the list… you could miss the actual contest posts down the road. This makes it possible for you to see us in your timeline all the time. Don’t worry though, we promise not to spam the heck out of you. We get it – We don’t really like being beaten over the head with advertisements either.

Boom. That’s it. Heck, if you live in Greenville we can even bring the glass to you or vice versa! If you’re an out-of-towner, never fear. We’ll just ship you the glass, free of charge or swing by and bring you the glass next time we’re in your town. So what do you say? Help us build our numbers in exchange for a chance to win a few of the first ever pieces of Brewery 85 glassware.

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Check out this post from The Patch about our coming adventures in the beer industry!

Just a brief snippet for a taster if you don’t feel like clicking through:

“We’d like to be a journeyman brewery really. We want to provide something for people experiencing craft beer for the first time. We want to offer session able beers for tenured craft fans and we also want to have a few things for the intense beer nerds as well,” Will said. “The South has a few craft breweries, but we want to really mesh ourselves with the region. We were born and raised here and we want to give it world class beer. Of course we have our year beers, but for our seasonals, we want to try to donate a portion of the proceeds to local charities like The Generous Garden or Hands on Greenville, things like that.”

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Just dropping you guys a little note about our recent feature in the Greenville News!

If you missed it, you can catch up on the entire article here. It deals with the blossoming southern craft beer culture and entrepreneurship in the upstate.

For just our section you can read here:

[regarding the amount of young professionals in Greenville being part of the craft beer customer base]

Will McCameron, 27, and partner Jeremy Caldwell, 27, are betting on the same thing. The new owners of soon-to-be Brewery 85 are playing up the brewery’s Greenville origins in their marketing. The name of the brewery pays homage to the big interstate that passes through the region, after all.

Bottom line, McCameron says, they could have opened a brewery in Asheville or somewhere that has long been known for beer, but, “we might not be as appreciated there.”

“This is where we want to raise our kids,” he says. “We love this community and we don’t want to leave.”

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Well, we finally got on the ball and got our website out to you folks. We here at Brewery 85 wanted to make absolutely sure we could bring you a top notch, easily navigable site that best represents us and our products.

Stay tuned to our Twitter and Facebook pages for now to keep up with the day-to-day operations of our small company.

Make sure you browse the entire website. Learn who we are on the About Us page or drop us a line on our Contact page. Make sure you also take a look at Our Beers and see what we have in store for ya’ll.

Always enjoy Better Beer!

- Will, Jeremy, & Meredith

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