On Wednesday, August 8th I arranged to call Chuck Silva, the brewmaster of Green Flash Brewing Company at 12pm (EST) the next day in order to catch up after not seeing each other for over a year. Subsequently, in the minutes before I was due to call him I decided that I’d record our conversation in order to share any information about new beers etc. that he would share with the craft beer community. What I didn’t expect was that Chuck would call me instead of me initiating the conversation. Therefore, I ended up beginning my recording of the conversation after we had been talking for about ten minutes.

In those first ten minutes I told Chuck about my hiatus from blogging and my goals for The Brewed Palate. In addition, he began to tell me about how things are going in Green Flash’s new location (6550 Mira Messa Blvd., San Diego, CA) and the advantages of its open warehouse layout. Specifically, the tasting room can now fit a big crowd of visitors who are met by palates of bottles, barrels, etc. after entering the brewery. To put this in perspective, visitors to their Vista brewery were met my by a 25 barrel brew house immediately upon entering the brewery.

In the new tasting room Chuck tries to keep 12 to 14 different Green Flash beers on tap. The amount depends on whether the brewery has met its production goals for the week. Meaning, if those goals have been met more kegs can be put on tap. If you have yet to visit the new brewery, I’m sure listening to the above interview will tempt you to do so.

The final topic that we discussed before I began recording was the common impression of many craft beer drinkers that Green Flash Brewing Company is larger (brews more beer etc.) than it actually is. In sharing my opinion on this topic I remarked that this impression may come from the popularity of their year round beers. For example, most hopheads (lovers of hop forward beers) have tried or have heard of how good Green Flash’s West Coast IPA is. However, this type of popularity is quite different from that of hyped breweries such as Surly and Three Floyds who only distribute to a small number of states. What I mean by this is that despite distributing their beers to markets in about 30 states, they have yet to brew over 40,000 barrels (give or take) in one year.