Entries by Brent Manning

Collaboration Update Pt. 1 – Revelry Brewing+Jolly Pumpkin

This year’s Brewvival brought together some of craft beer’s finest to Charleston for an epic weekend of tastings, dinners, and boozy brunches. If you weren’t able to make it down, don’t despair. Several of the visiting rock star breweries joined forces with the local talent to create something special and uniquely southern!

The first collaboration features our new friends at Revelry Brewing Company who teamed up with Jolly Pumpkin Artisan Ales out of Ann Arbor,

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Legislative Meeting at New Belgium

We got an opportunity to meet up with several legislators, board members from the NC Brewers Guild, and our local brewing community this week for a “State of the State” meeting. New Belgium hosted the event and served up Citradelic, Blue Paddle, and some other favorites for the crowd. Green Opportunity’s Kitchen Ready Program prepared some great food as well!

Needless to say, I love the fact that this constitutes a work day!

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FAVORITE BEERS OF 2015

A brief break in production here at the malt house has provided a minute to share a few of my favorite beers of 2015. Not necessarily new beers, just new to me. Presented in the order they were consumed and noted.

ECLIPTIC / WICKED WEED / STONE – POINTS UNKNOWN IPA

A lot of brewing fire power went into this one! 25% Barrel aged Belgian Tripel and 75% West Coast IPA blend.

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2015 Planting Update

As summer fades into fall, we shift our energies from analyzing crop samples to planning for the future. Winter grains are planted in October and harvested in May or early June throughout the south. Orchestrating the harvest, cleaning, and planting of these grains requires a tremendous amount of communication between the malt house and our network of growers. Working on a contract model helps us secure our raw materials for the upcoming year and gives the farmer peace of mind that he will adequately compensated for his harvest.

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B Corps Meeting with Patagonia

“Malt with a Mission”

Call it a slogan, tagline, whatever you want. Regardless, it doesn’t always get the attention it deserves. Those four words capture our desire to connect local farmers to the craft beer industry, while taking care of our employees and our planet. Simply put, these goals have been a part of our DNA since day one.

One of the companies we’ve used as a model for our development is Patagonia,

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Homebrew Kits! Now Accepting Pre-Orders

homebrew kits

Introducing Riverbend homebrew kits! We’ve developed an American-style rye pale ale recipe kit that showcases the range of our hand-made, floor-malted, artisan malts. The grain bill is a combination of our Pale and Heritage regionally grown barley malts, combined with a pound and a half of our Carolina Rye malt (the same stuff that went into the New Belgium Hop Kitchen RyePA) and a couple ounces of our specially-roasted chocolate malt.

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Expansion: Complete!

After months of installing, calibrating, and troubleshooting our new equipment, we finally have the various components of our expansion dialed in. We’ve done several runs now with everything in place and though we’ll continue to make adjustments as we go along, we’re excited to get into a rhythm and focus on doing what we do best: making great malt.

Here are some of the final pieces of the puzzle to get us to where we are today.

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Meet the Brewer: Luke Holgate of Hi-Wire Brewing

To celebrate this week’s bottle release of the latest seasonal from Asheville’s own Hi-Wire Brewing, we’ve got a quick Q&A with Hi-Wire’s head brewer Luke Holgate. Uprisin’ Hefeweizen was brewed a couple weeks ago using our Appalachian Wheat Malt and it’s a damn good beer. Kick back with an Uprisin’ and enjoy!

When did you start brewing? What was the first beer you ever brewed, and how did it turn out?

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Meet the Brewer: Todd Boera of Fonta Flora

We’re starting a new series on the Kiln Blog: Meet the Brewer. The Meet the Brewer posts will introduce you to some of the special people that make what we do possible. They’re the ones crafting delicious brews out of our malt.

Though Fonta Flora Brewery in Morganton just opened last fall, they’ve quickly made a name for themselves with their unique, locally-focused craft beer. Head brewer Todd Boera has made a wide range of beers that you just can’t find anywhere else: a dandelion brett saison,

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Brew Day with Sierra Nevada

You may have noticed last week that a few of the Riverbend maltsters showed up in an article on NPR about Asheville’s booming craft beer industry. Just how did we end up in the right place at the right time? Well, we were very lucky to spend the day hanging out during brew day with one of our newest neighbors: Sierra Nevada.

Brew Day with Sierra Nevada

We were all pretty excited when Sierra Nevada invited us to come over to their new brewery in Mills River to help brew the Asheville Brewers Alliance collaboration beer.

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