E-Malt.com News article: USA, WA: Valholl Brewery to expand to downtown Poulsbo

The most pressing project of Jeff Holcomb, the co-owner and the head brewer of the Valholl Brewery, is the planned move of the year-old brewery from its roughly 700-square-foot garage space to a 1,735-square-foot vacant office building closer to downtown, Kitsap Sun reported on March, 18.

"We're on that line where we can't do more than what we're doing in the space we're in," Holcomb said.

More than doubling the square footage of the brewery will allow Valholl to better serve its customers, which includes increasing the number of barrels Holcomb and fellow brewer Jordan Rodgers currently produce.

"We needed bigger space to put in bigger equipment to make more beer," Holcomb said. "We want to keep 10 featured beers on tap and then four rotating styles. That's kind of ambitious with the size we are, but I love beer."

Valholl Brewery opened in January 2011 in garage space below longtime business owner Bill Austin's house. The brewery owners have done little advertising, but word-of-mouth and being highlighted on local brewing websites has kept them busy. Holcomb joked they outgrew the space the first day the brewery opened.

After their first year in business, the owners of Valholl can proudly say they're in the black. But as the brewery's only full-time dedicated employee, Holcomb says he'd like to draw a regular paycheck going forward. With more space, the brewery owners hope in another two years to be making five to seven barrels of beer a year — that's a significant increase from the third of a barrel the brewery is currently producing. After that they envision running a 15- to 30-barrel system.

"We want to be able to bottle and distribute," Holcomb said.

The expanded space will give Valholl that option and will provide more space for customers to come in and taste the various recipes floating around Holcomb's head — he currently has between 42 and 44 recipes he's thinking about, he said.

The brewery has two-story brewing tanks and when it started could produce about 250 gallons of beer at a time, that's significantly more than the keg-by-keg production capacity of the other breweries that opened in Poulsbo around the same time, including Valholl, Slippery Pig Brewery and Battenkill Brewing Co., which recently announced its closure.

Valholl needs to make the move downtown. Holcomb hopes that will happen around May, 1.

"We want to be able to close and move on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and then Thursday open at the new place for our tasting room hours," he said.


21 March, 2012