Societe Brewing was founded in San Diego for a specific reason—in our opinions, it is the center of the universe where craft-brewing is concerned. With hundreds of breweries, and droves of famous, award-winning beers from skilled, talented brewers, San Diego County is a top-tier fermentation destination if there ever was one. We wanted to challenge ourselves to brew to the level that our hometown’s artisans are known for; to earn our place within this magnificent community. So, it is with great elation that we announce our recent success at the 2019 San Diego International Beer Festival’s professional brewing competition. Behind the hard work of our brew crew, we brought home five medals (more than any other San Diego County brewery), nabbing a pair of golds in the process and barely missing out on Champion Brewery of the Year by a razor-thin margin.
Blog
Currently browsing: Beers
This Saturday, April 6, we will tap the first annual edition of The Brewster, an IPA brewed to raise awareness and funds for the Pink Boots Society, a non-profit organization educating and advocating for women in the professional brewing industry. This year’s brew was spearheaded by our tasting room manager, Lia Garcia, who offered up some thoughts on what this beer and this organization mean to her…
Read MoreTo celebrate the 40th anniversary of the legalization of homebrewing in the U.S., we’re sharing a scaled version of the recipe for our American Stout, The Volcanist. Big on roast and dark-chocolate notes with nicely balanced evergreen hop bitterness from Cascade hops, it earned us a bronze medal at the 2016 Great American Beer Festival in the American Stout category. We enjoy it immensely and hope sharing this recipe with you allows you to do the same. Use the blueprint below as a guideline. By no means is it intended to help you clone The Volcanist. Everybody’s equipment and ingredients will vary, but this is a good starting point. If anything, we’d love for our homebrewer fans to brew this once, then tweak it to their liking to create something that is ideal for their palate. We invite you to make it your own and hope you’ll share the results with us via social media or direct emails.
In 2015, the Brewers Association added a new category to the world’s largest annual brewing competition, the Great American Beer Festival. That style, “Session IPA,” comprises India pale ales coming in under 5% alcohol-by-volume. Societe Brewing was proud to take the first gold medal in that category with its “Really Small IPA,” The Coachman. Crafting a low-ABV IPA is very difficult. With less body and balancing alcohol, many come across as wimpy, watery or unappetizingly out of balance. It took a great deal of thought and tinkering to get ours just right, and it was an honor to be recognized on the industry’s largest stage for that accomplishment. And it was even more satisfying this weekend when The Coachman struck GABF gold in the Session IPA category again, cementing its status as the best beer of its style in the country.
Around here, we’re very selective about every ingredient that goes into our beer, but none so obsessively as when it comes to hops. We offer numerous IPAs, but each has its own distinct character thanks to the blends of hops that form the basis for their flavors and aromas. In 2014, our brewing team desired to learn as much as possible about the sensory aspects of individual hop varietals, so they developed a recipe for a single-hop IPA and began producing the beer on a continual basis, utilizing a different hop each time around. Dubbed The Bachelor for the way it played the (hop) field, that single-hop canvas has provided our brewers a crystal-clear interpretation of the 30 varietals that have rotated into its makeup. Detailed records of each hop’s assets (and even some of their shortcomings) have been kept from day one. That stockpile was an invaluable tool in 2017 when our brewers set out to construct a new, contemporary IPA called The Fiddler, which would fall in line with the storied likes of The Pupil, The Apprentice and The Coachman IPAs.
Thanks to all of you, we have enjoyed six incredible years being part of San Diego’s amazing craft-brewing scene. To celebrate, we toyed with ideas for grandiose events spanning multiple days and a multitude of (overly) complicated initiatives, but in the end we decided that saying “thank you” to our fans was paramount, and that doing so should be simple and straightforward. And that’s what this year’s anniversary festivities will be all about. Beginning Wednesday, June 6 (6/6…get it?, we will have special-edition glassware on sale for $10 each (that includes your first beer). These fine-looking collectibles fit nicely with the specialty glasses we’ve produced for each of our preceding anniversaries. Adding to their worth is the fact we will take $1 off of every beer that we pour into SOCIETE 6 glasses from June 6 to 30. This even applies to our Feral ales and, extra-special bonus, these glasses hold more than our standard tasting-room glassware, so this equates to quite the multi-week economic coup.
May 3, 2018 marked a significant moment in the history of our brewery, as co-founder and brewmaster Travis Smith took the stage with Societe colleagues Kevin Schmaltz and Mike Boggess to accept Societe’s first-ever World Beer Cup gold medal in Nashville, Tennessee. That heavy metal was earned by The Thief, a wine-barrel-aged Feral ale rested on Grenache Blanc grapes our brewing team hand-processed with our friends at Escondido’s Vesper Vineyards. Inoculated with Brettanomyces and our house blend of pleasantly-invasive microorganisms, it took top honors in the Mixed Culture Brett Beer category thanks to its balance, exotic flavors (earthiness, spice, vinousness) and a complex, distinctive funk. All too often, award-winning beers are hard to come by, but we are happy to report that we still have a respectable inventory of 500-milliliter, corked-and-caged bottles of the winning vintage (2017) of The Thief available in our tasting room. Stop on by and get a taste of this milestone beer while supplies last!
Visitors to our tasting room will notice a brand-new version of a long-time beer, our single-hope lager, The Bachelorette. This comely, perpetually-unattached femme fatale has brought on a new beau, and he’s at the heart of our new offering, The Bachelorette with Simcoe “Shake.” What, pray tell, is “Shake,” you ask? ‘Tis a valid question and one that can be adequately, nay, expertly explained by Societe co-founder and brewmaster Travis Smith…