Meet Tyler King of The Bruery
Thursday, July 29, 2010 at 8:00AM | Leah Greenstein Patrick Rue loves beer. Belgian beer, to be specific. He started brewing it while he was in law school as a diversion. And it worked. These days everything else is a diversion from beer at Rue’s two-year-old, rapidly-growing brewery in Orange County, California, punnily named The Bruery. Tucked into a non-descript industrial park right off the 57 freeway, the Bruery team works around the clock crafting some of the most innovative beers on the domestic market, Belgian-style or otherwise, in a deft waltz between three 15-barrel, one 30-barrel and three 45-barrel gleaming stainless steel fermenters.
"There's nothing bland about our beer," head brewer Tyler King told Steve Greer and me on a recent visit to the Bruery (see our interview with Tyler above), and that is for certain. Where most West Coast breweries seem content to one-up each other in the "my beer is hoppier than yours" game, the boys at the Bruery are yeast fanatics. They have their own proprietary Belgian yeast strain (the Filthy Blonde we tasted was a yeast propogation batch) and play around a lot with brettanomyces and lactobaccilus. And they infuse their beers with David Chang-like creativity. Right now they’re working on a 100% brettanomyces black Thai beer infused with galangal root and keffir lime that has the savoriness of Tom Ka and the richness of a stout, while never falling out of balance.
