Scottish craft brewery BrewDog starts building a new standalone sour beer facility, located at BrewDog’s headquarter in Ellon/Scotland, 17 miles north of Aberdeen. According to a press release “the brewery extension, with the working title ‘Overworks’, will commence construction on 16th January, and will enable the UK’s number one craft brewery to expand on its previous experimentation with wild and sour beer, farmhouse ales and mixed fermentations, adding to its popular existing headliner, abstrakt, seasonal and small-batch ranges.”
The non-conformist Scottish brewer has hired Richard Kilcullen, former head of sour production at Wicked Weed Brewing from West Asheville/North Carolina, as brewmaster for Overworks.
“Having risen rapidly up the ranks at Wicked Weed - moving from assistant brewer to overseeing its award-winning barrel programme in only three years - Richard is known for creating delicate balances of extreme flavours and traditional sour beer concoctions,” describes BrewDog the skills of Kilcullen and goes on to elaborate on his future tasks. “Known for incorporating the local flavours and flora into his beers, Richard intends to find native yeasts and microbes everywhere from the heather-strewn fields of Aberdeenshire, to old orchards and the icy peaks of the highlands. He hopes to tap into localised wild yeasts as well as and barrel ageing, and create a range of BrewDog beers with their own unique identity.”
Kilcullen describes his mission as following: “There is an old quote from Benjamin Franklin that says something along the lines of ‘Beer is proof God loves us and wants us to be happy.’ If you can take yeast from thin air and make beer with it, he might just be right.”
The brewery extension will be founded by BrewDog’s Equity for Punks scheme, which has raised £30m ($36.5m) since first launching in 2009, amassing more than 50,000 shareholders.
