HenHouse Brewing has officially moved out of Petaluma and opened its new brewery and taproom in South Santa Rosa. I got invited to the soft opening, and needed no further persuasion to hop in the car and check it out. Soon, you can too: the taproom grand opening and release of HenHouse’s new sour is Saturday, March 5.
As originally reported in The Press Democrat, this is a 75,000 bbl brewhouse, with initial production estimated at 5000 bbls. Likewise, there were 7 beers on tap over the weekend but I counted 21 tap handles. It’s going to be fun to watch HenHouse grow into this space. They’ll be filling some of those taps with fun tasting room-only beers from a 2 bbl pilot system.
They’ve got all the brewery taproom bases covered: full pours, small pours (essential at a place you almost have to drive to), growler fills, comfortable and casual vibe. They’ll be putting in more outdoor seating so you can look forward to drinking a HenHouse saison in the sun, as nature intended.
Some of you are skimming down the page wanting more about that sour beer. Okay. Co-owner Collin McDonnell kindly slipped my table a sample of it and I advise you to get excited about HenHouse’s barrel program. Stony Point Sour is “our house Saison aged in a mix of white wine barrels for about two years with Chardonnay juice, strawberries and boysenberries,” said Collin. “We have at least two more definitive beers lined up in the barrel program: saison with Chardonnay juice blended with a lactic fermentation which tastes like sparkly wine cooler peaches, and a barrel aged saison with kumquats. All three are different blends of the same base batch. Going forward, our funky/sour barrel aging program will take on a shape like this: multiple blends out of one batch. It’s a cool way to pull out different aspects of one beer.” Word.
HenHouse is located at 322 Bellevue Ave, Santa Rosa, 95407. The hours will be Wednesday through Friday 4-9pm, and Saturday/Sunday 11am-9pm. You can bring your own food or get chow from Red Horse Pizza on Friday through Sunday. It’s legal to bring the kids. Go get some good beer made by good people.
(Disclosure: I’ve been bullshitting with Collin on Twitter and running into him at bars for a few years now, and he bought my first beer at the taproom.)