Autumn Arch started with a small idea four years ago. It was just after my family moved into a new house, just down the road from my brother Dann back in August 2014.
I figured that since we now lived so close to each other, we were obligated to share a backyard hobby together. I wanted something that could be conducted year-round and had a tangible output, which eliminated gardening and most sports. We could have built a clay pizza oven together, but it would have been difficult for the visiting brother to transport the output home (although, I am still keen to do this myself one day when time allows).
Several of my co-workers were into homebrewing, and being engineers, they were really into the science of the hobby. So naturally, my thought process drifted to beer brewing, and Dann had some experience in this endeavor from his early career days when he occasionally brewed with a high school buddy. I liked the idea of my new hobby involving cool equipment and tools (not coincidentally, I was also into climbing, cycling, and computer building at the time), so I proposed that we start brewing together.
It was at that point that Dann’s eyes lit up, and he gleefully skipped over the horizon, returning a few weeks later with a highly engineered (but mostly cobbled together) home brewing system, with which we created our first beer - a delightful porter. We called it Left Shark...a tribute to the left shark on Katy Perry’s Super Bowl halftime show back in 2015 (the left shark did his own dance out there instead of whatever choreographed routine was planned...and I respect that). I wish I still had a bottle of that beer to do a taste test against. There was so much we didn't know about recipe development back then, so I wonder how it would stack up against a porter we brew at Autumn Arch. Regardless, Left Shark was zestfully consumed by family, friends, and colleagues. And you can still find it on Untappd along with Dann's original label. Look for 841 Brewing.
We were not aware of it on that cold December afternoon, but the Autumn Arch Beer Project began that day. Dann and I are looking forward to sharing our project with you later this year.