One of St. Petersburg’s Cycle Brewing most sought-after series of bottles usually arrive during Tampa Bay Beer Week and mark daily releases each day throughout the week. Each beer is named for a day of the week and contains different adjunct ingredients or blends of barrels, showcasing the versatility and depth of Cycle’s barrel-aging program. Like many parts of 2020 and 2021, the series is progressing but differently than expected.
Update on the Weekday Bottles…
We are obviously way behind schedule at this point and had extremely high hopes this update would be a release scheduled for this coming weekend, sadly it is not. For anybody interested in the why, here is a brief rundown of what we have been working on. We bottled the set, high fived and sent off the last round of bottles for lab testing expecting everything to be all clear as usual, process was running smoothly and numbers looked great on our end. A week later we were poised to announce release details but only 6 out of the 7 days passed, Friday failed. Not the end of the world we thought, pasteurized it again, that should work right? Tests take a week, and we failed again. Ok, time to take off the kid gloves, dial up the temp and time for pasteurization, hitting 40 pasteurization units (PU’s) should handle all the known lactic acid bacteria. It did not, another week gone. Disappointed but willing to take this to 11 because making 10 louder didn’t work, we maxed out and just let bottles explode like popcorn, losing 20% of the bottles but reaching a ridiculous 105 PU’s and a top temp of 68.1 C. That should definitely do it, multiple conversations with lab techs, online research, we can’t miss! All the cuts from broken glass were worth it, right?!? Results came back today – we made progress but not down to zero where we can confidently sell this. We are making a new beer at this point, we will package New Friday this Friday, send off for labs which based on history have an excellent chance of being all clear, and we will have an update within 2 weeks. We are awfully excited about the other 6 beers, and New Friday for that matter, we can’t wait to get them out, but some things just fight the whole way it seems. We remain extremely committed to quality product, our customers know and expect the best and we intend to deliver that. Old Friday as we are calling it will be kept, with declining numbers we are going to let it sit, keep checking it, incubate samples and run labs over time and since it still tastes fabulous without even a hint of infection there is some hope that someday it will be available.
About Cycle Brewing
Downtown St. Pete’s craft beer brewery and tasting room. Sip on these fine brews inside the bar or on our sidewalk. Don’t forget to fill a growler or Crowler (canned growler) of Cycle beer to take home.
Downtown St. Pete’s craft beer brewery and tasting room. Sip on these fine brews inside the bar or on our sidewalk. Don’t forget to fill a growler or Crowler (canned growler) of Cycle beer to take home.