Month: June 2015

Ready Your Pint-Holding Hand for Medford Beer Week, 6/12-20

SOCBF logoSo maybe we’re not brewing beer just yet, but we certainly know how to appreciate a good local beer gathering. You’ll find us – imbibing and tasting – next week at Medford Beer Week and the Southern Oregon Craft Brew Festival, Saturday, June 20th.

Medford Beer Week is a citywide annual celebration of the craft beer industry, focused on local and regional craft beers. June 12th-20th you’ll find happenings everyday in breweries, tasting rooms, markets and restaurants around town. Check out the Kickball Tournament or Brews, Burgers & Bluegrass on 6/13, rally your brainiest buds for Trivia Night on 6/16, or sign up for a Beer Dinner on 6/17. Find the full list of events with Medford Beer Week online, and fill up your calendar with events everyday (if you feel so inclined, you beer connoisseur, you).

On Saturday the 20th, you’ll find local and regional craft breweries pouring at the Craft Brew festival – just down the road from our soon-to-be brewery – on Bartlett and Main Streets in Medford, OR. The event runs Noon-8pm, and promises beer, food, and good times. At the door, $16 gets a pint and five tasting tickets (or $14 if you buy early at Beerworks Bottleshop & Tasting Room in Medford) and the event is open for beer-lovers 21 and over. Taste some great craft brews side by side, then take your logo’d pint home to relive the annual soiree over and over again (“Remember that one ale from that one tent in that one area? That was awesome!”).

We’re excited to see lots of local beer fans around town – be sure to stop over and say “hi” if you pass by the brewery throughout the week. We may not have beer to contribute to this annual celebration just yet, but we’re eager to jump into the fun and cruise around town tasting all the other great varieties Medford has to offer. Look out for us at Medford Beer Week in 2016!

5 Steps to Opening a Brewery

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Welcome to Our Brewery-Building Journey! We’re diving in and remodeling our historic building, developing our website, and launching our new blog. We’ll keep you up-to-date with brewery happenings, craft beer industry news, beer and food pairing tips, behind-the-scenes Q&A’s, and more. Really, whatever tickles our fancy for the day.

Though we’re still several months away from opening our doors at Common Block, we want to share a bit about what we’re learning along the way. We’re calling it: 5 Steps to Opening a Brewery, but you could also call it An Oversimplified List of All the Things to Keep in Mind When Jumping into the Huge Endeavor of Opening a Brewery. Because – wow – there’s a lot to do. And it’s also ridiculously fun. Which is why we’re throwing a few highlights your way…

Step 1: Decide to dedicate your life and time to craft beer. Sure, this sounds like the easy part. And in a sense, it is. We’re doing this because we love joining together over craft beer and good food, and we can’t imagine wanting to do anything else. It’s also time-consuming, tiring, mind-boggling, fun and rewarding. It’s a complicated range of emotions, and we promise we won’t spill any tears into the brew tanks (whether they be of exhaustion or joy).

Step 2: Assemble a team of people who feel the same way. There’s nothing quite like geeking-out around a table about a topic we all love. Talking about making good beer while drinking good beer is about as good as it gets in our minds, and we spend hours discussing the smallest brewpub details because, heck, they matter.

Step 3: Pick a location for your brewery. Make it one that you love, because you’ll be spending a lot of your time there. We knew from the beginning that the history and style of the Monarch building was exactly what we wanted for our vision of Common Block. Love for craft beer is universal, and breweries succeed in all kinds of settings from alleyways to main streets, from strip malls to immense campuses. Make sure it’s a place you love and feel connected to (but maybe not your mom’s house, if that’s what you’re thinking).

Step 4: Develop an idea and feel for your place. Will your focus lie in brewing great traditional styles, or pushing the envelope with new ingredients and varieties? Will you serve food, or call on local food trucks to bring by snacks for hungry fans? Personally, we’re looking to brew ales with Pacific Northwest ingredients, make food from scratch in our prep kitchen, create a kid-friendly atmosphere, and roll up our big garage doors to let in some fresh air. Mmmmm, we can see/smell/taste it now….

Step 5: Complete the following steps #6-782. No kidding, the list is actually huge. We just couldn’t put that in our post title (who would read 782 Steps to Opening a Brewery? Well, we would, but we’re nerds). The list of things to do is ridiculously long. Gathering permits, finding equipment, writing proposals, submitting plans, generating recipes, and picking the right color of paint for the ceiling. But it’s also fun. Like, outrageously fun.

Stay tuned for more news on Common Copy Blog. Thanks again for joining us as we jump head first into everything Common Block!