The Bruery Bends Its Own Rules To Make 1st Set of IPA Releases

The Bruery had verboten IPAs from its portfolio since opening nearly a decade ago. Keeping on that promise has stuck true, but found Patrick Rue found a loophole. He created another brand.

Debuting on April Fool’s Day, The Bruery announced the formation of Offshoot Beer Co., the third brand for the Southern California brewery.

Rue told Brewer that he knows many of The Bruery, and Bruery Terreux consumers still buy IPAs, it just wasn’t being purchase from his facilities.

“We love IPAs, we drink them a good chunk of the time,” he said. “Being able to sell hoppy beer directly to our customers is something that has really only become a possibility for us in the last two years.”

Offshoot will release two canned releases each month, debuting with Fashionably Late, a juicy, hazy IPA and Better Late Than Never, a counterpart Double IPA.

Rue noted that consumers are much more educated, now more than ever, when it comes to IPAs, and being able to directly sell the beer from The Bruery taproom.

“The beer is so delicate and consumers are getting so educated that the opportunity to sell IPA to consumers that is only two days, or even two hours before they got it is hugely appealing now,” he said.

Rue said his company saw IPAs as a busy part of the market and The Bruery had nothing to add.

“But I think IPAs aren’t really a style any more, it’s a genre,” he said. “Anything hoppy is an IPA now and it’s been hard for us to not make something that could fall into the IPA category since it’s so stretched.”

Andrew Bell, The Bruery’s pilot batch brewer has headed up this project and he is thrilled to be working in the hoppy segment.

“It’s nice to work with a genre that was verboten at the brewery,” he said. “I love drinking hoppy beer and brewing hoppy beers at home and before I worked at The Bruery. It’s pent up creativity and drive and passion. I’m stoked about it. We know where we are looking at for the can and ideas of what sort of taste we want and I think we are in a good position to hit these out of the park.”

Rue said that it’s been a very grassroots, low capital pursuit. No capacity increase was made, the branding is done in house and a contract canner was hired along with adding hop contract.

“Basically if this flops, we don’t want to have a bunch of equipment to sell off,” he said with a laugh. “This made us wonder why we haven’t been doing this before. It was an easy decision. But we think it will capture a lot of the public’s attention, especially those that like hoppy beers. I hope they want to seek it out.”