Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Growlers and Bottles

Hey all,

I have been asked a few times about the beer to take home from the Portsmouth Brewery so I wanted to clear it up for everyone. First and foremost we are a brewpub. This means that we can only serve our beers onsite. Our licensing dose not allow us to ship/distribute bottles or kegs to Florida, Mass, any local liquor store or even across the street. So if you want to enjoy a Portsmouth Brewery beer of any kind you are going to have to come to us and enjoy it at the pub in Portsmouth NH which is a great town to visit anyways :)

Once you are here, we do serve growlers of all of the beers that are brewed on site (except for Kate the Great of course). As soon as a new beer is on tap you can come and get a growler to take home with you. We recommend not getting growlers of our Black Cat Stout, Oatmeal Stout or Milk Stout because the are served off the Nitro tap. A nitro tap has a defuser build into it and it purposely de-carbonates the beer as it is being poured into a glass. Hence giving you a great head on your stout in the glass. If you did get a growler of one of these stouts there would be no carbonation left in the beer and it would be a super flat black water by the time your wanted to drink it at home.

The bottling situation is a little trickier though. We do a very limited bottling of most of our beers and stop bottling them when we are getting low in the serving vessels. The bottles are sold on a first come first serve basis, so there is no way that I can tell you if there is going to be a certain beer on a certain date available (except for Kate the Great of course). The 22oz bottles are sold in the retail store and if we run out of a certain style there is a possibility that we will be bottling it again. That is of unless we are just plain running low on the beer then it will just finish out its life being served off the tap here at the brewery.

I hope this clears up some confusion rather then creating more.

After reading my ramblings i want to make it a bit simpler. Growlers of everything are available as long as it is on tap (all except Kate). And bottles you are going to have to take your chances and come in to see what we have in 22oz. See ya all soon!

Cheers,
Tyler

10 comments:

  1. Thanks for clearing that up Tyler! I hope it helps some people. I always viewed brewpubs as a great place to get really fresh beer, and if you enjoy it thoroughly, you can bring some more home for sentimental reasons!

    Can you also bring back your empty growlers for a little credit off your next growler fill?? I have two I'm sitting on and will probably be up there Jan 31st for my birthday.

    Sean

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  2. Oh ya you can get a credit for returning glass. I belive that it is a $4 credit for a returned growler. You get a freshly cleaned growler with the beer of your choice in it. Then the dirty growler comes into the celler here where i get to clean it. So give them a rinse before you bring them back, just to help me out :)

    Cheers,
    Tyler

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  3. Tyler - What are the costs for growler fills? I'm assuming the first is more expensive than subsequent refills? Also, we can only use Portsmouth Brewery growlers, right?

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  4. Refills were, at one point, $8 for regular biers and $12 for premium biers. They are now $12 and $16. I know costs for everything have risen, but it seems that a 33% increase was a bit steep... $2 more, okay... but...??

    Also, any Smutty or guest biers on tap CANNOT be growlered...

    Prosit!!

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  5. Yes the price of beer has gone up slightly. But if you have been following the prices of the raw materials the cost of brewers grain rose around 50% and the cost of hops, depending on variety, at least doubled and in some case quadrupled. So good thing we didn't have to quadruple the price of the beer!

    Cheers,
    Tyler

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  6. Hi,

    I just wanted to jump in to let everyone know that refills of standard beers are $10 and refills of premium beers are $18. Both prices were raised $2.00 in '08 for the reasons Tyler mentioned in his blog posting earlier today.


    Best regards,

    Brennen Rumble
    General Manager
    Portsmouth Brewery

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  7. Premiums are up to $18 now? Holy scheisse!! Must be real recent, because I'm looking at a 14DEC08 receipt where I bought one at $16 and tipped $2 for a bill of $18. Prices for premiums have skyrocketed!! Ya know, IPC members should get a discount on growlers!! ;-)

    Prosit!!

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  8. Regarding growlers, what is the ABV threshold by which ia bier is considered regular or premium? Thnx

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  9. How long can you expect a growler beer such as Weizenbock to keep carbonated?

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