HenHouse Brewing isn’t new to Northern California, but its tasting room is.
After four years in Petaluma, California, the brewery has moved up the road to Santa Rosa and expanded with a 900-square-foot tasting room that seats 50 patrons while also going from sharing a brewing space to running its own 30-barrel system.
The brewing system will be active by April, and the tasting room will officially open with a Grand Opening on March 5. With a soft open this week, HenHouse president Scott Goyne was, as he put it, “stoked,” after the process took 10 months from the first time they toured the facility.
“This tasting room will allow us to give our customers a first hand experience with our story, process, and love of brewing,” he said. “We have created a comfortable space to give our fans a fun, lively, and thirst quenching experience.”
This will be the first time consumers can buy beer at the brewery. Having a alternating proprietorship with Petaluma Hills Brewing priorly, and using a 10-bbl system, HenHouse had only been available through distribution channels. Now they will have a place for people to buy from the source.
The expansion gave job growth as well, as Goyne has hired six new employees with plans to add a few more this year. Goyne said the city of Santa Rosa and the Sonoma County community have been very receptive to the move of the brewery.
“Our focus on sourcing local goods and services creates a positive impact on our relationship with our new home town, and our growth within our amazing Bay Area,” he said.
The tasting room features 21 taps, which will eventually be full of not only 15 beers but also six house-made non-alcoholic beverages.
“We spared no expense in designing a tasting room that allows you to get lost in our delicious Saisons, stouts and hop bombs,” HenHouse wrote in a newsletter to consumers. “We’ll be offering flights, pints, and growlers of six beers to start, and releasing our latest barrel aged beer: the Stony Point Sour, a Saison aged in white wine barrels with Sonoma County chardonnay juice, strawberries and boysenberries.”
The Sonoma County redwood in the tasting room was milled at Sturgeon’s Steam Mill outside of Sebastopol, California, the coffee on tap was roasted by Acre Coffee in Petaluma and shirts are made and printed in Petaluma.
“At every step of the process we asked ourselves how we could work within the Sonoma County community and support the people we live next to, work with and share beers with,” HenHouse wrote in the newsletter. “The result is a true Sonoma County community space.”
Goyne ventures that HenHouse will produce 3,000 bbls this year once the new system is up and running. It also will bring back the original three-bbl system as a pilot-batch making opportunity to experiment with new recipes and try them out in the tasting room.
“This expansion will allow us to grow our production business in a first-rate facility that is built to GMP food production standards, as well as dramatically expand our Barrel and Sour program, as well as fire off new experimental brews,” Goyne said.
The new brewhouse is being built by Criveller of Sonoma County.
“We could not be more proud to be working with a local manufacturing firm who has a team of fabricators building our system right in our backyard,” Goyne said. “Our boiler, chiller, and grain mill are all-American made products and we are so proud of this new equipment.”
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