Kate's Volume

To answer your question about why we can't make more Kate then we already do. Here at the Portsmouth Brewery we are a 7bbl Brewhouse, some brewpubs are 10bbl even 15bbl capacity. Us, being smaller allows for more flexibility and creativity to create a wide variety of beers from our blond ale all the way to the complex Kate RIS. But this small size limits the max volume we can make of one type of beer as well. Our biggest Fermenter (we have 2 of them) is 14bbl in capacity. These are designated for our more popular beers to ferment out in so we can keep up with the demand; Blonde Ale, IPA to name the few stand-bys that are always on. To be able to fit our specialty brews into these takes a few months of planning making sure we have enough back up in our serving tanks and in our horizontal condition vessel to allow us to use the big double Fermenter to make a specialty beer. So after all this planning we can finally brew a double batch of Kate. But since Kate is a RIS we use an insane amount of grain and only run off 5bbl of wort. This gets our original gravity to 26 oP and what allows the Kate to be 11% abv. So this means that with a double batch we get a total of 10bbl of beer to serve. So 10bbl is the most that we can make with our current fermentation space we have now.

This year we are changing up the service slightly. We are transferring 7bbls of Kate into a serving tank to serve off our taps. And the remaining 3bbls we are going to bottle off before June 24th @2:27pm so there will be plenty of bottles available that day (40ish cases or so). About the limit of bottles one person can buy I will have to talk to a few people to see what the state law is and our regulations as a brewpub. But I do know that Three Floyds in Indiana has there Dark Lord Day (their RIS that isn’t as good as ours). Where they release 600 Cases (40bbls) and their limit is 6 bottles per person. But I will be getting back to this soon.

Cheers,
Tyler