The Rare Barrel is a

brewery A brewery or brewing company is a business that makes and sells beer. The place at which beer is commercially made is either called a brewery or a beerhouse, where distinct sets of brewing equipment are called plant. The commercial brewing of b ...

and

brewpub Craft beer is beer manufactured by craft breweries, which typically produce smaller amounts of beer than larger "macro" breweries and are often independently owned. Such breweries are generally perceived and marketed as emphasising enthusiasm, ne ...

Berkeley, California Berkeley ( ) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Anglo-Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland, Cali ...

, United States, that exclusively produces

sour beer Sour beer is beer which has an intentionally acidic, tart, or sour taste. Sour beer styles include Belgian lambics and Flanders red ale and German Gose and Berliner Weisse. Brewing Unlike modern brewing, which is done in a sanitary environment to ...

History

Founders Jay Goodwin and Alex Wallash met while attending

UCSB The University of California, Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara or UCSB) is a public land-grant research university in Santa Barbara County, California, United States. Tracing its roots back to 1891 as an independent teachers college, UCSB joine ...

. They started home-brewing in their apartment and decided that they would one day start a brewery together. Goodwin started working at The Bruery, where he worked his way from a production assistant to brewer, eventually becoming the head of their

barrel aging A barrel or cask is a hollow cylindrical container with a bulging center, longer than it is wide. They are traditionally made of wooden staves and bound by wooden or metal hoops. The word vat is often used for large containers for liquids, ...

program. The Rare Barrel brewed its first batch of beer in February 2013, and opened its tasting room on December 27, 2013. The Rare Barrel was named for "pH1" a barrel used to make the original batch of La Folie in 2000 by New Belgium Brewing based out of Fort Collins, Colorado. In homage of the original "Rare Barrel", every year the brewery along with its customers and peers select the best barrel of beer and name it "The Rare Barrel" for that year. The "pH1" barrel was gifted to The Rare Barrel by New Belgium in 2015 and as of 2016 is currently active, used to age dark sour beer. In November 2022, Cellarmaker Brewing Co. acquired The Rare Barrel and plans to reopen the facility late spring next year.

Production

The Rare Barrel only makes sour beers which are aged for an extended period of time in oak barrels; all of their sour beers will age on wood for anywhere from six to 36 months. Their beers are fermented with a combination of

Brettanomyces ''Brettanomyces'' is a non-spore forming genus of yeast in the family Saccharomycetaceae, and is often colloquially referred to as "Brett". The genus name ''Dekkera'' is used interchangeably with ''Brettanomyces'', as it describes the teleomor ...

yeast and

Lactobacillus ''Lactobacillus'' is a genus of gram-positive, aerotolerant anaerobes or microaerophilic, rod-shaped, non-spore-forming bacteria. Until 2020, the genus ''Lactobacillus'' comprised over 260 phylogenetically, ecologically, and metabolically div ...

and/or

Pediococcus ''Pediococcus'' is a genus of gram-positive lactic acid bacteria, placed within the family of Lactobacillaceae. They usually occur in pairs or tetrads, and divide along two planes of symmetry, as do the other lactic acid cocci genera '' Aerococc ...

bacteria. Lactobacillus and Pediococcus bacteria are both responsible for creating lactic acid and acetic acid, which make the beers acidic and taste sour.

Awards

Several beers from The Rare Barrel have won gold and silver at the

Great American Beer Festival The Great American Beer Festival (GABF) is an annual beer festival hosted by the Brewers Association, held in Denver, Colorado. Typically held in late September or early October, the event is currently held at Denver's Colorado Convention Cente ...

and the

World Beer Cup The World Beer Cup is an international beer competition organized by the Brewers Association, a trade group A trade association, also known as an industry trade group, business association, sector association or industry body, is an organizatio ...

History

Production

Awards

See also