Homebuyers looking for a price break aren’t the only ones moving to Fairfield. Heretic Brewing Company has been making beer there since May, leaving behind its alternating proprietorship arrangement with E.J. Phair in Pittsburg.
I followed chief Heretic Jamil Zainasheff around the brewery recently and got a some exciting updates. Here’s the tl;dr for you short-attention-span folks: Heretic’s new brewery is really nice, the taproom is open, and there’s a Heretic/Mitch Steele/Mike McDole collaboration beer coming your way. Read on for details…
Aeriel view of Heretic’s new digs.
Big and getting bigger
It’s obviously not as sizeable as the Anheuser-Busch plant 7 miles down the road, but Heretic’s new facility gives them a lot of room to grow. They have the option to buy the whole building someday, and the mirror-image (Evil Twin?) building across the way. A capacity of 50,000 bbl is not out of the question.
The brewery now houses three 120-bbl (3780 gallon) conical fermenters. For scale, each one could hold all four of the smaller fermenters they used in Pittsburg. (The smaller fermenters made the move to Fairfield, too.) They’re called Bamforth, after brewing professor Charles Bamforth, and Larrabee, after a distributor friend who was super helpful to Jamil back in the day. The third still needs a name.
Baby bears…
…papa bears.
Lookit this promising collection! Heretic plans to do more barrel aging and sour beers in small-format bottles and 750s. Speaking of sours, Heretic has also been hosting brew days for The Rare Barrel.
come to mama…
I was too awed by the 1000 square foot cold storage to even remember to take a picture of it. It’s bigger than my apartment (or a raquetball court). Pallets are stacked up 3 levels high. Unlike almost every brewery coldbox I’ve ever been in, there’s currently a lot of free space…we’ll see how long that lasts.
There’s going to be lab space where Heretic will do quality control, and an air-conditioned break room — Fairfield gets hot, and so does every brewery. There are also some features that the average Joe might not appreciate but which make the Heretic crew very happy. For instance, Jamil’s face lit up showing me the loading dock, which he called “the sweetest thing in the world.” The old brewery didn’t have one and he estimates it saves them hours a week.
In fact, talk to Jamil about the brewery for a while and you will hear plenty of references to things they’ve carefully tweaked to save hours and/or money, like how Heretic staffer Warren went DIY on the grist case and saved the company $6000. There are breweries growing recklessly as we speak. Heretic isn’t one of them.
Have a pint (or a growler)
Heretic’s taproom is now open Tuesday through Friday 3-8pm and Saturday and Sunday noon-5pm. It’s got 16 taps (not all in use yet), bottles to go, and growlers for sale.
The bar — another Heretic DIY project — is covered in photos of brewery employees, friends of the house, and brewhouse construction. The photos will be fun for anyone to look at, but for Jamil, it symbolizes what beer drinking is really about. Motioning to the bartop, he proclaimed, “I have all these friends because of craft beer.”
I hear Heretic beer tastes better underwater…
Upcoming collaborations
Sometime around Christmas, Heretic will brew a collaboration beer with two heavy-hitters: beer author and Stone brewmaster Mitch Steele and award-winning homebrewer and Brewing Network personality Mike “Tasty” McDole. (This will not be a Stone beer, just Mitch brewing with some friends up north.) The recipe and other details are still in the works, but Mike recently told me it’ll probably be something hoppy. Shocking 
Jamil hasn’t forgotten his homebrewing roots, either. He plans to set up a homebrew-sized system in the brewery and invite non-industry folks to help him use it. Then the beers — technically not homebrews since they were made commercially — can legally be served at the taproom. Talk about one-offs!
You can follow Heretic on Facebook or Twitter, or better yet, visit the new taproom or email tours@hereticbrewing.com to book a brewery tour. Sip, spread heresy, and drive safe.
