Adam Paysse, one of the original partners in Holy Mountain Brewing, just provided an update on the status of his new brewery, Floodland Brewing. Operations began eight months ago at Floodland, which is located in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood, and beer should start to trickle out early in 2018. The focus is on barrel-aged and mixed-culture beers, which explains the lag time.
The beers will be rare, exclusive, hard-to-get. This is by design and by necessity. By design because smaller production is a byproduct of the kind of beers he wants to produce. By necessity because he is attempting to avoid the kind of hoopla (long lines) that has surrounded some other breweries and beers.
“My goal is to focus on making beer as much as possible, which necessitates a small operation,” said Adam in a recent newsletter. “The trade-off of the small scale of Floodland is that there is less beer, which leads to concerns about exclusivity. My goal is to make the beer as available as possible while maintaining a balance that allows me to continue to stay hands-on making the beer, and to be able to pay rent in Seattle.”
“Oakworks is my bottle club,” said Adam. “My goal with Oakworks was to create a way to sell beer directly to people who wanted it in a way that made the brewery as sustainable as possible for me. I don’t like asking people to line up to buy beer, because I don’t like waiting in line to buy beer, so I wanted to find an alternative way to handle sales.”
Floodland Brewing does not intend to have a taproom. The beers will be available in bottles in limited supply. The best way to get hold of these beers is by joining Oakworks, Floodland Brewing’s bottle club. It is sold out for 2018. Some of the beers will also be released to the public. If you want to stay informed, join the mailing list. If you want to get on the waiting list for Oakworks, read on.
“There is a ‘reserve’ list for Oakworks,” Adam explains. “Folks on the reserve list are effectively on the waiting list for any bottle club spots that open in the future, and more importantly, the first public availability outside of Oakworks will be announced to those folks first. My goal is to have a public bottle release by summer 2018 at the latest.”
“The reserve list is a separate mailing list, so folks who just want news and stories on the making of the beer can be on [the regular] email list, and folks who want both news and bottle sales details, and Oakworks membership offers, can be on that list. Don’t bother untangling the logic of why I set it up that way, it’s a quirk of how things are set up behind the scenes.”
Floodland bottle sales are done online through VineSpring, an ecommerce platform design specifically for wine (and now the beer) industry. To register for the reserve list, sign up here: https://floodlandbrewing.
About the Beer
Adam says that much of the wort is brewed at Seapine Brewing in Seattle, where he brews on weekends and during off hours. The unfermented wort is then moved to the Floodlands facility in totes, where it is fermented and aged.
“Most of my fermentations start in an open top tank made by Foeder Crafters in St. Louis. Some primary fermentation takes place in barrels or puncheons, but oak fermentation is not by any means a rule or a statement, simply an easy/affordable way to make the beers I am making and to be able to create components from which to blend.
“I am also working on native/ambient fermented beer using a coolship made by fabricator Chris Baker in Bellingham, and those beers will come out when they are ready, most likely not until 2019 at the earliest.””
“I am using a variety of cultures, including a few mixed saison-esque cultures, which are mostly comprised of yeast strains I’ve appropriated from bottles of real saison along with some English strains. Due to the nature of open fermentation these cultures pick up ambient/airborn yeast and bacteria, and as the culture is repitched from batch to batch it naturally has a tendency to evolve and change. Because of this many of the beers have some degree of acidity, although my tendency is towards light acidity, which I balance by blending, hopping, and so on.”
There has been a lot of buzz about Floodland Brewing among hardcore beer lovers around the Northwest. It’s understandable. Few breweries in the Northwest, or the world for that matter, approach the business of beer with such patience.
No thanks, sounds too complicated and elitist. Beer should be very accessible and not be rare and sought after before anyone has ever even tried it or heard of the brewer. And it especially should not require only a club or waitlist to try some. But to each there own I guess.
Not to argue but people actually _have_ heard of this brewer, and without a taproom a club/list seems totally reasonable to reach the initial crowd of folks who are interested in the beer…that is how you get to reach a wider audience, by making a good product and getting it into the hands of initial adopters. Not sure what weird proletariat vibe you bring to the local scene, but whatever. Statements like “beer should be very accessible..” without knowing anything about brew capacity or distribution just make you sound like a moron. Bottoms up!