In case you didn’t make it over to The Muddy Pig and aren’t glued to your social media sites (I swear, I only check every five minutes), then here’s the 411 on The Big Surly News.

2.7.11
Thanks to you, our Surly fans, we’re celebrating five years of Surly Brewing. We’ve expanded our Brooklyn Center brewery as much as we can and brewed almost three million pints of beer in 2010, but you’re still thirsty, and we can’t keep up. So, we’re excited to announce our plans for a new brewery. But this ain’t just any brewery, it will be a destination brewery, worthy of our fans.

The new $20 million destination brewery will be a two-story, 60,000 square-foot building, complete with a roof deck beer garden, a 250-seat restaurant with mouth-watering view of our brewery, and a 30-foot bar.

The brewery is good for us, and great for Surly fans, but it’ll also benefit our state by creating as many as 85 construction jobs to build it over nine months and 150 permanent Minnesota jobs, and offer a complete event center, for concerts, parties, business events, weddings, and more. Now there’s a reason to renew your vows.

It’s a big idea but it’s not a done deal yet. We can’t be licensed as a brewpub because we brew too much beer so Minnesota law currently says we can’t sell beer in the new brewery. We are working with legislators right now in hopes of getting the law changed because a restaurant, bar and beer garden have to be a part of the new brewery. We may need your help soon, please keep checking our web page and our Twitter and Facebook pages for updates.

With the support of our fans and the great state of Minnesota, we can build this destination brewery and start cranking out 100,000 more barrels of Surly beer every year—more than 850 percent more beer brewed than last year. Getting thirsty yet? Hell yeah you are!

Let’s get more Surly!

Hmmm. What do we have here? Summit Unchained #6? Damian McConn’s baby?! Read on for details about Summit’s 6th beer in the Unchained series, Gold Sovereign Ale.

Draught Release: March 7

Package Release: March 21

Beer name: Gold Sovereign Ale

Brewer: Damian McConn

Color: Straw Gold

Malts: Organic Westminster Floor Malt

Hops: Boadicea, Sovereign, Pilgrim, First Gold

Yeast: UK Ale Strain

OG: 1.060 SG

Gold Sovereign: Where the past meets the future. Combining a 19th century recipe with 21st century ingredients, Gold Sovereign seeks to emulate the pale ales of the Victorian era using ingredients that have only become available in the last few years. The ultra-modern barley variety Westminster gets the traditional malting approach through organic cultivation and malting by hand on the floor. Highly disease and insect-resistant hedgerow hops were developed from classical varieties using time-honoured breeding techniques. These ingredients are combined with a unique English yeast to produce a refreshingly drinkable beer with a solid malt base and assertive character. Expect this unfiltered ale to have an aroma of pear, apricot and spicy orange, leading to a pronounced hop bitterness and malt flavour reminiscent of freshly baked bread.

In Damian’s words:

I’ve always been extremely interested in beer, specifically ale, produced in the 19th Century. This was a transformative time for brewing in general, with the switch from the largely small scale brewing of the 18th Century to the large industrial operations of the 20th . In the UK by the middle of the 19th Century, brewing styles were becoming more defined, with paler, hoppier beers such as Pale Ale challenging the darker, more established styles of Porter and Brown Ale.

Since it is very difficult to replicate process conditions and ingredients from this period, but recipes do exist, I thought it might be fun to produce a beer based on an old recipe but incorporating some of the most modern varieties of malt and hops available. Our base malt, Westminster, for example, was only approved in the UK for brewing a few years ago. However, I decided to use the organic, floor malted version as a nod to the production methods used in malting during the 19th Century. We also often seem to think that very hoppy/bitter, and/or high alcohol beers were somehow only “invented” in the last twenty years by brewers on the US West Coast. An examination of some European recipes from the past indicate however, that this approach is not a recent fad but has existed for some time!

Hopefully this beer will showcase some of the best modern varieties of malt and hops available in the UK today, while providing some insight into the pale ales of the past.”