Great article about some local Yahoos you may have heard of

[shazapple]

http://huddle.today/trailway-journey-basement-brewery/

Having started as a chartered accountant making beer in a basement with his engineer friend Dan Mason, Jake Saunders says building Trailway Brewing has been a constant experiment in what works and what doesn't.
Trailway is in full gear on the Northside of Fredericton, supplying their American IPA style brews to a limited number of pubs in Fredericton and Saint John and NB Liquor locations while serving up a rotating selection in their on-site taproom.

We sat down with Saunders to find out how business is going and what's coming up next.

Business is really solid so far. We've recently done an expansion in the last couple months. Our first beer sold was in December of 2014. We started both working full-time jobs elsewhere, and we started in my basement in the Devon/Marysville area. We started on a one-barrel system. We started kind of slow and we went about a year doing three batches of beer per week trying to hold down full-time jobs...We had to either go for it or kind of fold the business.

We signed the lease here in December of 2015, started construction in January of 2016 and we were open here late May of 2016. I quit my full-time job the month before that and I've been here full-time ever since. We've expanded twice now and we have a lot of staff. I think now we have 14 or 15 staff. When we first started it would have been Dan – the other co-owner – and I, and Dan's parents. They're investors in the business. And my mother. They were all retired and helping out with the brewery... Anytime you came in, it was family members working down at the bar.

We're in five accounts in Fredericton and two in Saint John... We don't need to go outside the city. We'd rather pick and choose who we want to deal with and be in the ones that have a good beer reputation.

What are you working on now?

As of today, we brew seven batches a week. We went from two to four and now we're doing seven...We have a ton of interest from Nova Scotia, but we just have to keep saying, 'no, can't do it.' You want the shelves here to be stocked. You don't want to have the stores always mad at you and they always were in the past.

We do six beers we sell in the liquor stores. If a store were to order, we'd probably have four of them in stock. Right now we're still not to the point where we can fully meet demand but we're a heck of a lot better than where we were.

It's good because the demand is there. We're not having to sit on beer. The beer sits in our fridge for no more than two weeks at a time.

We're doing hoppy, American style ales. Our beer is super hazy, super murky. That's the look, that's the style of beer we do. It's a hazy, hoppy, low bitterness style of beer. That's what we home brewed for years... Nobody in New Brunswick was really making it at the time before we started doing it.

The downfall to those beers is that they don't age well at all. You want to be drinking them within that month of production. They've got to be stored cold at all times. We're big time sticklers on keeping the product cold.

What's your latest brew?

We do three beers year-round and we do three beers seasonally. We have our winter seasonals and our summer seasonals. Right now we're doing our summer seasonals. The three we do year-round are Hu Jon Hops, Ripe and Luster. We'll do those 12 months a year. Our summer ones are Beyond Reality, which is a raspberry wheat beer. There's Patio, which is an American wheat beer and Dunder. Those are all in the five per cent or lower. Wheat seems to be a common theme because generally, people like drinking lighter beers in the summer.

We love playing around with different recipes... Every week that you come in here, we'll have a new beer. Not completely new but we'll do an IPA.  This week we canned Ellipse, which is an IPA with amarillo and basically a hop that we wouldn't typically use. We released it probably five months ago and it's coming back.

We have a sour series of beers. Next week we're doing El Generico. This one we're doing with about 150 pounds of apricot puree. We've done a lot of sour beers but that one's just purely experimentation. Anything new and experimental like that, people will go out of their way for... We love playing around with recipes, doing new things.