Hotel, an Imperial Porter, was released in late November.  We bottled only 60 cases in 12 oz. bottles and every last bottle was sold over two weekends.  What a tremendous success!  It seems that there still may be a little confusion about the series.  Why is this beer called Hotel? Why can’t I get this in bottles outside the brewery? Why does it taste so good?  Let’s see if I can help out a little.

The idea for the series came during a “sampling session” as all good ideas usually do.  I think it was 2005, but I can’t be held to that.  As we discussed ideas for new beers, we realized that we had a ton a good ideas and not enough time to make production runs of all of them.  Everyone around the table was so excited by the idea of doing a variety of new styles.  We figured that we had to come up with a way we could make it happen.  What we came up with was to release beers in draft only.  It would keep the packaging cost down while getting the beer out in the market.  Well it was time to try it.

Slam Dunkel, a Double Dunkelweizen, was released soon after.  Sound familiar?  It was a great success.  Yes people liked it but better than that (ok, at least as good) was that we were able to make a new beer, package it and sell it out completely before the first keg left the building.  Problem:  Our Visitor’s Center Manager was continuously being asked why the beer could not be purchased at the brewery in bottles.  We tried to explain, but quickly realized that it made a lot of sense to make a small amount available at the brewery.  It was also clear that it did not make sense to make bottled beers available in all markets.  I think that’s called a seasonal.  OK, now we offer as small amount for sale through the Visitor’s Center (Sat’s 12-3pm).

Next problem:  How do we come up with names for all these beers?  “Let’s have another session and figure this out.”  During that session, we came up with the idea of doing a list of some kind, hurricanes?  Too much risk in a bad one, hurricane that is…  ”We would like you to try our lovely Katrina Imperial IPA.  It’ll blow your mind!”  We finally landed on the English International Phonetic Alphabet or more commonly known as the one the military uses (i.e. Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, etc.).  As I stated earlier, we just released Hotel and you can look for India, a West Coast-Style IPA, in February.