We’re still waiting for a response.  Click here to read more

Wow, thank you all for all the support yesterday. You forced Magic Hat to respond! Unfortunately, they won’t talk to us directly, so we have to use Facebook to share what we think with them. Please like and share the info here.

West Sixth Fans - We really need your help today.  Can you go here and please sign our petition to tell Magic Hat no more!

Wow, what an amazing first Lexington Craft Beer Week that was.

From the official release of Country Western, to the amazing events throughout the week at our friends and retailers, to the incredible number of folks who visited us at our taproom, we had a fantastic time.

And, for all of you who came out to help us celebrate the end of Craft Beer Week with our Think Local, Drink Local event, we hope you had as good a time as we did.  Our annual celebration of local craft beers featured beers by Beer Engine (the first time they’ve ever distributed outside of their taproom), Country Boy, Apocalypse Brewing, and Against the Grain.  They sent us some fantastic beers, so much so that we were out of all of them by 9pm!  Wow!

Thanks again, we couldn’t have done it without you.  We look forward to an even bigger celebration in 2014!

Huge, huge news today folks!

Today, we’re announcing that we’re collaborating with Country Boy Brewing on the first ever Lexington brewery collaboration brew!  It’s a hoppy-pale ale that we’re calling “Country Western”, and will be the official beer for Lexington Craft Beer Week (Which is May 13-18, more info here)!

We couldn’t be more excited about this collaboration.  It just goes to show how far the Lexington craft beer scene has come.

Full info is below from the official press release.  The beer will be available around town (and in both of our tap rooms) only for the week of May 13th!

Can’t wait to share this one with you!

——-

It’s our birthday, and we’re inviting you to our party!  After all, we wouldn’t be having a birthday without you!

This Friday, we’ll have been in business for a year, so we hope you can join us for our Birthday Party.  Doors will open at noon, and we’ll be celebrating all day.

It’s hard to believe that we opened our doors just one year ago with 4 beers on tap.  In May, we began distributing our IPA throughout Central Kentucky.  In June we began distributing our beer to the Louisville area and doubled our capacity.  In January 2013, we began distributing our second beer, the West Sixth Amber, and also began distributing to Northern Kentucky and Cincinnati.  And now, we’ve got 9 beers on tap in our taproom and are expanding our capacity even more!

Hope you can join us for our celebration.  We’re going to release our Saison Bellaire at noon, and we’ll have 5 different Amber firkins that are dry hopped with different hops (Apollo, EXP 6300, Falconer’s Flight 7 C’s, EXP 4190, and Calypso) starting at 5.

We’ll have cupcakes for 300 of you all (what’s a birthday without cake?) from our friends at Sunrise Bakery.

We’ll also have presents for the first 500 people who come by.  We’ve had special pint glasses made for the occasion (in 4 cool colors), and we’ll be giving those out starting at noon.

So, come on down. Click here to join the event on Facebook. You’ve been a critical part of our success, so we hope you can celebrate with us!

When brewers speak of “brewing” in the context of the beer-making process they are generally referring to the production of wort, which is the sweet liquid that is fermented into beer. We use a two vessel “brewhouse” to prepare the wort. One tank is used for wetting the grain grist into a mash and then extracting the resulting wort while leaving behind the solids. The second tank is used to boil the wort. The wet solids left over from wort extraction are called spent grain(s). This spent grain basically consists of sprouts (the malting process involves germination), husks, unconverted starch, some protein, and whatever residual wort is left behind. Depending on the recipe, the spent grain tends to have a pleasant bready aroma when fresh. As wild yeasts and bacteria go to work on it this nice scent can change to a sour, and later on, rancid scent. This is analogous to compost. Well-turned, aerobic compost can have a tolerable, even pleasant, smell while anaerobic compost can be pretty nasty.

Not surprisingly, spent grain makes an effective feed for livestock. We have a couple farmers who haul it off and feed it to their cattle. Cows really enjoy it, probably because of the leftover sweetness. Chickens will eat it while turkeys less so. One farmer has commented that his pigs just roll around in it instead of eating it. Apparently pigs are picky eaters despite their “eating slop” reputation.

I should say that one thing we are really excited about with regard to spent grain is the launch of our non-profit neighbor FoodChain next door in the Bread Box. FoodChain plans on using a modest portion of our spent grain output as an input for their aquaponic system. I will refer you to the website www.foodchainlex.org before I butcher their mission statement. Briefly, aquaponics is the melding of aquaculture and hydoponics together in a loop system with both sharing the same water. In their setup, tilapia and leafy green vegetables will perform their respective roles with the spent grains being experimented with to augment the tilapia’s diet.

Furthermore, once FoodChain is up and running with their aquaponic operation, they will investigate the use of our spent grain as a medium for mushroom cultivation. After being used for growing mushrooms, and in turn being twice-spent grain, this used grow medium could be further used for making vermicompost. This compost is made by feeding worms and harvesting their waste, which are called castings. Worm castings are considered one of the best composts. As part of a later phase, FoodChain will further use this vermicompost, now thrice-spent grain, in hoop-house grow beds on the Bread Box roof. Maybe you do not get excited about dirt like I do, but you have to admire how much action those spent grains are going to see!

Expansion is one of those things that a small brewery can really screw up. There are only so many days in a week and only so many barrels in a fermenter, so each time we get ready to enter a new market, we have to be certain that we aren’t going to overpromise and under-deliver on how much beer we can produce. Over the last 10 months, we have crunched the numbers each time before entering markets like Louisville, Paducah, and Bowling Green and have started distributing West Sixth into pretty much every corner of the state, except for one. Well, it’s time to change that!

That’s right! Having signed with Stagnaro Distributing, West Sixth beer is heading to Northern Kentucky and Cincinnati starting this week. Our cans and kegs of IPA will be hitting the shelves and kegerators all over the area plus we will be attending the Cincinnati Beerfest later this week. So, why now?

First, brewer Andy Smith joined the team in the brewery a couple of months ago so, alongside Robin, they are now able to fully utilize the two 60 barrel big kahuna fermenters we picked up late last year. Those guys, along with Andrew and Tyler, will be brewing, kegging, and canning IPA and Amber pretty much every day to make sure there are no beer emergencies.

Second, we have added to our keg numbers enough that we are able to support another market. Each time we enter a new account (restaurant, bar, etc.), we need around five kegs available to service that account correctly. So, it takes a lot of kegs to make our world go round. Luckily, we now have a lot of kegs.

Finally, the time is right. There are a ton of events coming up in Northern Kentucky and Cincinnati early in the year, and we want to be there for each and every one. As mentioned, we are coming to Cincy Beerfest, but we plan on heading up I-75 every chance we get spending time with all our supporters. Please let us know if you there’s an event you think we should be at, and we will do our best to get there.

So, look for us in your local place and, if you don’t see us, please ask for West Sixth wherever you go. We’re currently available at a few places — Party Source, DEPs, Liquor City, Party Town, I-75 Liquors, Hyde Park Wine and Sprits, and a few others — for an up-to-date list, look here. We really appreciate all the support we receive and are excited to be here. Cheers!

We’re excited today to make a major announcement:  we’re moving forward with canning our second beer.

We’ll begin canning our Deliberation Amber, under the name West Sixth Amber, next month.  This beer has been available on draft in Lexington for a few months, and the response has been tremendous.  We’re excited to be able to offer it to our fans in a can.

We continue to be the only brewery in Kentucky to can beer.  We love the can because not only does it help the beer stay fresher longer than a bottle, but it is also much better for the environment.  Cans are much more likely to be recycled than bottles, and they can be taken lots of places that bottles can’t – like at a pool or on the lake.

We love the design of the new can, which was designed by local artist Brian Turner of Cricket Press.  It resembles the look of the IPA can with an obviously different color, and the use of grains instead of hops in the design.

We hope you’re as excited as we are about this big announcement. The cans are on order — look for them in just a few weeks!

We’re excited to announce a program we’ve wanted to do from the very first days we started planning West Sixth: Firkin Thursdays!

Each Thursday, we’ll be releasing a special, one-of-a-kind cask ale in our taproom. We’ll tap it at 3pm, and will serve it only until it runs out — one day only. Come on down, each one should be quite fun.

What’s a Firkin / Cask ale? A firkin is a type of keg that contains “real ale” — a beer that is naturally carbonated by putting the beer in the sealed cask, or firkin, before the beer is finished. The carbon dioxide produced by the fermentation is what then carbonates the beer, causing a different type of carbonation when compared to the rest of our beers. This also provides an opportunity to add a little something special to the beer – to have some fun and augment the flavor.

This week we’re offering our IPA dry hopped with Amarillo. It is a tasty one for sure. So come on down — get here early — and try it on Thursday!