E-Malt.com News article: USA, OR: Falling Sky Brewing to open in February

Lane County’s growing band of brewers soon will get another member — Falling Sky Brewing Co, The Register-Guard reported on January, 8.

The grand opening of the brew house is set for February, 7.

Inspired by Munich’s beer halls and London’s neighborhood pubs, Falling Sky hopes to become a local favorite for handcrafted beers.

The business is the culmination of the dreams of Jason Carriere, the owner of a local home brew shop; Rob Cohen, a seasoned restaurateur transplanted from Ithaca, N.Y.; and Corey Wisun, a Eugene chef with a focus on locally sourced ingredients.

The Eugene-Springfield area already is home to two well-known craft breweries, Ninkasi Brewing Co. and Oakshire Brewing, and a half-dozen brew pubs that serve their own beers. But people in the local beer industry said there’s room for Falling Sky.

“I think it’s a slam dunk,” said Mike Coplin, an owner of 16 Tons, a taphouse near Falling Sky’s home brew shop and brew pub, “They have a great base in the community. And Corey (the brew pub’s executive chef) has a following in his own right.”

Falling Sky’s main owners Carriere and Cohen have been overseeing the renovation of a former tractor repair shop. German, copper-clad brewing equipment — bought secondhand from a failed brewery in Tokyo — will be the brew pub’s centerpiece.

Falling Sky’s owners declined to disclose the total cost of the project but said they spent $200,000 to $250,000 on the brewing equipment and cold processing area. They are financing the venture with their own money and a loan from Century Bank.

The brewers will be Carriere, Michael Zarkesh and Scott Sieber — all veteran home brewers. Sieber also was a head brewer at Eugene City Brewery — a Rogue brewery in downtown Eugene. The three have worked together for years at the Valley Vintner & Brewer shop — now called Falling Sky Brewing.

Falling Sky’s brew house plans to produce 800 to 1,000 barrels in the first year. The equipment’s capacity is 2,500 barrels. Their output will be much smaller than Ninkasi — the third largest craft brewer in Oregon, which produced 57,000 barrels last year — Oakshire, which produced 4,700 barrels and Springfield’s Hop Valley, 3,000 barrels.

But Carriere and Cohen said their goal isn’t to try to compete with Ninkasi and Oakshire.

“It’s not our goal to start bottling anything,” Cohen said. “Our goal is to make beer for here.”

That decision will enable Falling Sky to offer more styles of beer from around the world, Carriere said.

“Most brew pubs have six standard beers and two rotating taps,” he said. “We’d like three or four standard beers and four to six rotating taps, so people get a lot of variety.”

Carriere predicts that IPA (India Pale Ale), a Northwest favorite, probably will be Falling Sky’s most popular brew, but he said he also wants to offer lesser-known beers, such as an English-style bitter, a lighter ale with 3½ percent alcohol.

Falling Sky also plans to introduce a gluten-free beer.

“Working in the home brew shop, we hear what people want,” Carriere said. “We’ve heard about people driving up to Deschutes (Brewery) in Portland for their gluten-free beer.”

Existing local breweries said that the opening of another brewery will help, not hurt, them.

“We think it’s awesome,” said James Book, Ninkasi’s marketing director. “It just seems like craft beer is exploding and nobody can make enough, so the more local beer the better.”

“We’re happy there’s another brewery opening up,” said Jonas Kungys, co-owner of Hop Valley. “It’s good for the community. Jason (Carriere) is going to do a good job bringing new people to craft beer. It’s good for the whole industry.”

Oakshire co-founder Jeff Althouse said Oakshire, which sells most of its beer to restaurant accounts and in bottles to stores, won’t compete directly with Falling Sky, which will be making beer mainly to sell on the premises.

Even if the two breweries did become direct competitors, Althouse said, “There’s enough (business) to go around.”

“The more craft breweries we have to take market share from AB InBev and MillerCoors the better off we are,” he said.

U.S. craft brewers sold 9.9 mln barrels of beer in 2010 — the latest data available. Their sales increased 12 percent from 2009 to 2010, and were up by 15 percent in the first half of 2011, according to the Brewers Association.

Falling Sky was among 855 breweries who said in late November they planned to open in the United States, the association said. That’s more than double the number at the same time in 2010.

The brewery boom is reminiscent of an earlier one in the 1990s. In general, that “was an entrepreneurial trend,” Althouse said. “People thought it was a great business. But they weren’t brewers ...so they found themselves in the restaurant business and suffered the fate of a lot of restaurants.” A key difference now is the focus is on the beer, Althouse said.


13 January, 2012