Cover Story Notebook: ​Is Quality on Your Production Schedule?​

In a ongoing series, Brewer will take a small note from interviews of some of the cover stories it has run and give a small tidbit that didn’t make the issue, but is still worth diving into.

​When Brewer spoke with the four co-founders of Lexington, Kentucky’s Country Boy in the spring of 2017, the brewery was poised for lots of growth as it had just started getting going on its new 24,000​ square foot facility.

As a brewery grows, so does the want to be able to do more experimenting on the side while still churning out the products that have helped the brewery climb in barrelage.

Co-founder Daniel Harrison noted that when the brewery opened it put stock into barrel-aging with some hope of doing one as a flagship.

“Our experience with the market and sourcing the barrels that are fresh with the most flavor … everyone is trying to do it,” he said in the interview for the July/August 2017 cover story. “And the barrels don’t grow on trees — no pun intended — but I think that was something we had to step back on.

“If we can get some high-quality barrels to turn out some great product, then we will go ahead with it. But we are going to put the brakes on putting out a scheduled production release, because the quality has to be there for us.”

Harrison equated it to making a strawberry beer as a dedicated seasonal.

“It would be great to put it out each year, but if the crop was terrible, we wouldn’t put it out or fake it with extracts,” he said. “We want to make sure the quality is there before we commit to put things out.

“Trying to hit the production schedule isn’t more important than the quality schedule.”

​That doesn’t mean the brewery doesn’t go near wood. ​Fellow co-founder Nathan Coppage explained last year to Brewer that it does a Living Proof: Golden Wild Ale that it was getting ready to start pushing bottles into distribution. It’s the flagship beer from Country Boy’s Living Proof Wild program and every batch is blended from beer that has been aging for 8-18 months in oak and french oak. The blending is done by the Coppage brother, Nathan and Evan.