Matty Pierce, Gentleman of Draft & Bottle at KnB Wine Cellars in Del Cerro, is gearing up for tomorrow’s Halftoberfest event featuring Redlands-based brewery Hangar 24. We quizzed him about the party, plus what’s brewing at KnB.
What beers will you have on tap?
Saturday we will have all of Hangar 24’s flagship beers, as well as two vintages of Hammerhead, Pugachev’s Cobra, and a slew of special releases like their colaboration with The Bruery (Ichigo Highway), R.I.S. (base beer for Pugachev’s), four beers on nitro, and some other crazy shit I didn’t know existed.
What can you tell us about Hangar 24’s ‘Local Fields’ series?
The Local Fields series involves different fruit from different regions of southern California. For example, Vinacious has grapes from Temecula, while others use ingredients like local pumpkins or blood oranges in the brew. We will have all six for you to try.
What sort of food and activities will you have?
Food-wise we’ll have have Helles Lager beer-braised brats, as well as homemade sauerkraut from our Chef and beer mustard made with Orange Wheat. For fun we’re taking on two German Oktoberfest games. The stein holding competition is simple; the person who works out the most usually wins. You have to hold the stein out straight until your shoulder pops out and you need to go to the hospital, but your friends are too drunk to drive you there, so you drink the pain off. Hammerschlagen I still don’t understand but it sounds dangerous so I’m in. It involves a hammer and nails and a tree stump so we will see how that goes.
What’s brewing at KnB?
Del Cerro has a lot of homebrewers roaming around so we are going to kidnap them and make them brew us beer to put on tap. That is honestly the only direction we have as of now. If you can brew on a smaller system and make good beer and want to brag to your friends that your beer is on tap at KnB, hit us up. Eventually we will have bigger tanks back there to pump out a good amount of beer and will hire a head brewer; if you think you can do that, West Coaster reader, also hit us up. Until then, we will be busting out batches of whatever whoever wants to brew. As long as it’s good. If not, we will be offering $2 keg stands.
What events do you have coming up?
A lot is upcoming at KnB. April 6th is our Chingon Hot Sauce Launch Party. Chingon is our Chef’s new hot sauce company. Churchill’s and Carnitas’ Snack Shack are two spots that have already been supporting Chingon. So for the launch party we will have food from those two guys, as well as spicy beer from Ballast Point, Iron Fire, and Green Flash. Oh yeah, and a cask of Habanero Sculpin. There are going to be a lot of bummed out girlfriends the next day. April 27 is BeerBQ with Lagunitas; we’ll have Sucks, brandy barrel-aged imperial stout, and a ton of other great beers from them. Also, we will be doing a bar expansion in the next couple months to fully utilize our liquor license we recently obtained. Right now we have a good selection of single malts, bourbons and tequila, but in the future we will be hand-making cocktails and I personally will be drinking more whiskey than my liver can take. There is always new beer coming in, a lot of which I hoard until our anniversary party, which is the last weekend of June. I can assure you the taplist will be pretty epic this year. Or whatever your poison is. We have it. We will all drink it. And we will all be happy.