We are throwing a pre-opening party where you can taste pilot batches of the Porch Swing Pale and the Obligatory IPA. It’s our way of saying thank you for all the support and it’s a chance for you to taste what’s to come. So come one come all, and help us celebrate the upcoming arrival of Swing Tree Brewing Company!

Details: This Event will take place on April 7th at 8pm at Paddy Brannan’s Irish Pub in Ashland. You must be 21 years of age or older to attend this event. Paddy’s bartenders will be serving two Swing Tree beers at no charge but please help us show our appreciation for their hospitality and don’t forget to tip your bartender! Paddy’s full bar will also be open for purchasing drinks and snacks.

For more information check out our events page on Facebook.

Can’t wait t see you there! -The Swing Tree Brewing Company Team

Our main focus as of late has been on getting all of our licensing applications submitted, and we are happy to say that so far we are flying through the process! Our liquor license has been approved by the City of Ashland, and the TTB approval (federal) should come in just a few weeks. After that we just have to wait for our approval from the OLCC (state), and then we should be ready to open our doors by April or May.

While this is all moving right along and is in line with our original opening date, there has been a change in the plan as far as the capacity in which we will be operating.  Due to financial considerations, opening with our originally planned 7bbl brewhouse and taproom was going to put our opening date back another year. We considered our options and we decided that first and foremost we wanted to open our doors and get our beer out there for all to enjoy! With that, we decided to open with the ½ bbl brewing system we have been making our pilot batches on, and start with a very modest tasting room. Our brewing capacity will be limited, but we will brew every chance we get and sell every last pint to our local patrons. To make up for the limited quantities of Swing Tree beer, we will also serve a few beers from other Rogue Valley breweries at the taphouse.

So, to lay it all out for ya’:

 What you can expect at opening this spring:

• The same amazing beer we have been promising all along
• A modest taproom where we will serve 2 Swing Tree brands (The Porch Swing and a rotating tap) and a unique selection of other Rogue Valley beers
• Delicious fresh pizzas made by local bakery, Ichigo Cakes

What you have to wait for (don’t worry, not too long of a wait):

• Purchasing our beers off the shelves in cans
• Buying our beer in bulk (such as keg and growler purchases)
• Enjoying our beers at other local establishments around Southern Oregon.

While this wasn’t our original plan, we have become increasingly excited about opening in this capacity. It will provide us with an opportunity to really focus on the beer, and getting to know our customers before we are bogged down with the increased responsibilities of the bigger brewhouse. It will also give us an opportunity to get input from our community and really grow the brewery into something we have all created together.

Every dollar we make during this initial stage will go right back into the brewery while we work up to our original plan of a larger taphouse, a full selection of Swing Tree brands, and keg and can distribution. Until then, if you want to enjoy one of our creations you’ll just have to make your way to our taphouse, hunker down on one of our stools, and drink a beer with us face-to-face.

We hope you are all as excited as we are, and we can’t wait to see you at the taphouse. We feel like we have an amazing opportunity to build something special with our friends and neighbors and offer our beautiful community a neighborhood brewery they can be proud of.

Cheers- The Swing Tree Team

First, Swing Tree’s in the news again. We spotted this great beer blog, thebrewsite.com, which has a post about all the new breweries coming to Oregon in the upcoming months and Swing Tree is in there! Check it out, share it with your friends, and maybe even leave Jon a comment to thank him for spreading the word of all the amazing beer Oregon has to offer. Jon has a great site there, and even has a homebrewing section of his blog as well as tasting notes.

After weeks of contacting equipment manufacturers and getting bids, we have finally found someone we like to make our brewing equipment. Colin Preston with Practical Fusion will be putting together the Swing Tree steel and we are very stoked about it. Colin was building tanks for the brewing industry for many years for a large tank manufacturer in Canby, and has spurred off on his own to start Practical Fusion in Oregon City. We are very excited to be supporting another small business and even more excited that Colin was so open to building the system exactly to our specs. Here is a shot of a similar system he built for a small brewery in the Seattle area.

And for all of the geeks out there, here is a set of the rough drawings of our brew house.

She’s going to pump out nearly 600 bbls for us in our first year and we don’t think we’ll need to upgrade the brew house until we’re around the 1100 to 1200 bbls per year range. Once we button up our funding and get the deposits down on these bad boys there will be lots more pics to come. We’re grinning ear to ear!

On to other great news, we’ve been talking for a while now with a local baker here in Ashland about making the “fermented foods” part of our plan a reality. As mentioned in earlier posts, we have decided to scale back from the full-on restaurant portion of Swing Tree. We do, however, want to provide some great munchies at the taproom. So, we’ve teamed up with Nathan Kelsey, founder and Pastry Chef of Ichigo Cakes, to bake us some amazing focaccia bread pizzas. Just the other night we were working very hard, with a Lonely Trike in hand, sampling different combinations of toppings. It’s tough work folks but somebody has to do it. Much like our beers, the pizzas are still in the development stages and Nathan is making a few tweaks here and there to dial in the final product. I assure you, from the taste of those samples and having devoured many of Nathan’s creations in the past, these pizzas are going to knock your socks off. Check out Ichigo’s Facebook page and give them a like. Tell them we said hi.

Okay, let’s talk about cans. I’m sure that you’ve all noticed that craft brewers are moving toward this package at an enormous rate. Is it a fad; maybe. Is it a trend; I’d say yes. Is it really a better package; I’d say ABSOLUTLY! In my younger days I would hear folks talk about how beer from the bottle just tastes better…really? First off, I’m hoping that we are all on the same page about whether or not one should be drinking beer from its package, whatever package that may be. There is so much flavor a beer has hiding away in its head and aroma that drinking it from the package is just robbing yourself of much of the love the brewer put into that beer for you to enjoy. So, now that we are all drinking our beer out of some sort of glassware, we can focus on how the package really affects the beer before the drinking experience. Has anyone ever tasted a Heineken poured from the typical green bottle vs. one from the little keg shaped can? The canned product is a very tasty German style Pilsner. The green bottle lets light into the bottle which supplies that “skunky” aroma. The can is completely impervious to light. Another area of concern is the package seal. The seal on a bottle cap is made from a plastic type polymer which slowly lets oxygen into the bottle over time. Don’t get me wrong, large advances over the years have been made to keep the devil O2 out of our beers bottles, but the fact remains that the physical seam that seals the can is far better at keeping O2 out. Another great advantage of the can is that they can go camping, hiking, and fishing! Glass is just heavy, nobody wants to pack in a bunch of glass, and worse, pack it back out empty. Okay, one last thing, and I’ll get off the soap box. One 16oz “pounder” sized can of Porch Swing fits perfectly into a “real” 20oz pint glass. Why am I waxing on about cans and how cool they are? Well, you may have guessed, along with our tap handles at your favorite watering hole here in the valley, you’ll be able to find our super tasty flagship, the Porch Swing, in 4-packs and single 16oz cans at your favorite beer store. We are very proud to be working with Justin Brandt at Northwest Canning to begin canning the Porch Swing right away. Justin is going to come down to the brewery with his crew once or twice a month and can up a tank of Porch Swing for your enjoyment. Keep checking in here and at Facebook for photos and updates about the artwork and labeling.

More very exciting news for our Rogue Valley fans is an opportunity for folks to come down, meet the Swing Tree team, and try some of the pilot batches of Lonely Trike and Porch Swing. Our good friends at Apocalypse Brewing are celebrating the upcoming end-of-all-time by throwing a huge party at their brewery.  They will be staying open extra late for a Survivors Battalion tasting session where we’ve been invited to pour samples of our pilot batches. I’m not so sure that we here at Swing Tree buy into the whole end-of-the-world thing, but I’ll tell you this: there are not many places I’d rather be when it all hits the fan, than visiting with great friends over some hand-crafted pints of love. The whole thing is still in the planning phases right now, but we will certainly be updating everyone about the event as soon as we nail down the details. You can learn more about Apocalypse’s Survivors Battalion and how to become a member here. Be sure to stop by their Facebook page and like them if you have not already. Support the Lower Rogue Valley Craft Beer Scene and it will support you!

Well that’s it for now. We will continue to post frequent updates and other fun tidbits on our Facebook page, and will keep the blog updated on all the big progress. As always, thank you for all the support and we look forward to sharing a Swing Tree beer with you soon. Cheers!

Our number one priority has always been to make delicious, local, craft beer of the highest quality to share with our friends, family and community. We have found a passion in this craft and truly enjoy sharing it with those around us. Although it has always been about the beer, the next logical step was to pair our malt and hop creations with local, quality food and provide our customers with an even more comprehensive experience. While this is still our end goal, we have decided to hold back on adding the food for a while. We have rented a commercial spot in a business park where we are going to opening a brewery tap house. We will still be serving 5-7 taps of Swing Tree beer and we will still be offering local live music and other entertainment. This is going to give us a chance to focus on getting our brewing operations running strong and get our beer out into the community. As soon as we get settled and the beer gets flowing, we will slowly start working on incorporating food. Until then, we will welcome people to bring in their own food (we are working on a packed-lunch happy hour discount) and we will work with the local restaurants that deliver to make sure no one goes hungry while enjoying our tasty libations.

We still have awhile before we get to start brewing on location (now that we have a physical address we can start the licensing application) and we have a lot of remodeling to do before it looks like a tap house, but feel free to stop by and check us out any time. We will be in and out of the location daily, as we will be using it as our office until we can start brewing there. We would love to see a friendly face and get your input, and who knows, we might even have a beer or two lying around.

Thanks again to all of those who have supported us along our journey and all of those who will soon be sharing in the fruits of our labors. We are simply ecstatic to be moving forward and getting that much closer to opening the tap house and sharing our craft beer creations with you!

Cheers! – The Swing Tree Team

Swing Tree Brewing Co.
300 Hersey Street #7
Ashland, OR 97520

Here is the color version of the logo. Which do you like better?

We got the black and white version of the new logo today! We will also have a color version next week. We would love to hear what you think!

Check us out in this great Brewpublic article. We are so excited for all the new beer coming to Southern Oregon! 

A big thank you to all of our pledgers, and a special thanks to the following people for their help on the project: Ron Huffstutter, Evan Wilson and the Rogue Valley Messenger Team, Scott at SOB for his delicious liquid courage for our Take II video, and all the rest of you who shared the word and showed your encouragement. Thank you and we look forward to sharing a Swing Tree pint with you soon!

While we are great at making beer, we found our video making skills may not be as honed. Although full of great information, our first Kickstarter video was a little dry, so we tried again. Check out the new one, Take II, and let us know what you think! It just might make you smile!