Aaron

Glad you liked it! It's intended to be a really "sessionable" beer, as in something you can drink most of the evening and not feel weighed down or totally bombed, but we do plan on making more interesting/adventurous stuff in the future. As far as the skepticism is concerned, I totally understand where that's coming from. We're definitely in a bit of an odd spot, not having a place of our own or a brewery/tasting room that people can visit, so we need to do a better job of getting our name and story out there. That, too, will probably be easier once we have more beers available, and people get a better sense of what we're about.

Bird Brain Brewing here! Sten from Beltway pointed me in the direction of this thread, so I wanted to come and shed some light on things. Josh got it right. Our story is fairly simple (and not intended to be shady). In March of 2014, the franchisees of a few of the Lost Dog Café locations decided that they wanted a house beer that would be well-suited to pair with the food that they serve in their restaurants. In the past, they had re-branded other beers, similar to what Don mentioned a few posts back about how a lot of places had "their" house beer that was really just Old Dominion beer under a different label. It's actually a pretty common practice, but the Lost Dog crew wanted something that they could call their own. With that in mind, they set out to establish a house brand, with the hopes of expanding to a full line of beers and eventually a brewpub/brewery in the future. They brought me (Aaron) in to handle recipe design, and we got things started. We launched the brand about a year ago through a contract brewing setup with Beltway Brewing in Sterling, and released our flagship beer, a low ABV, malt-driven beer that we dubbed Joint Session Ale. Joint Session is currently the house beer at several of the Lost Dog Café locations including South Arlington, Dunn Loring, and McLean, as well as at Cowboy Café. We've also been able to get on tap at a number of restaurants and grocery stores in the DC & VA area. If you look at Untappd, you can get a sense of where the beer has been on - https://untappd.com/b/bird-brain-brewing-joint-session-pale-ale/813920. There's another restaurant in Reston that is, ironically, looking at selling our beer as their "house beer", so things kind of came full circle. The company is based in Arlington (from a legal standpoint), but we have brewed all of our batches thus far at Beltway Brewing in Sterling. The guys at Beltway have been really great to work with, and we're very happy with the product coming out of there, but they do not really have the capability to support smaller (less than 30 BBL) batches, which has limited our ability to expand our line, since we'd like to put a few experimental batches out before committing to a full production run. As our business evolves, there's definitely a potential for a brew site and tasting room, and we do intend to focus on Arlington for that eventual location, but in the meantime we're going to continue to grow the brand the best we can, expanding to focus on smaller, more frequent releases of seasonal and experimental beers to better serve the current craft beer market environment, which really favors new and limited-release beers over the more traditional flagship brand model. We hope to have our first of those beers out at some point in the next few months, and I'll be sure to update this thread when that happens. Hopefully that clears things up a bit. I'd be happy to answer any other questions people may have, just let me know!