Internal Brewsletter - December 17th, 2025
General
2025 by the Numbers
I’ve been compiling some fun data from across Block 15, and wanted to share a few of the fun facts that are getting shared with our customers and fans this week. Check them out! - Holly
This year, we packaged 1,649,344 pints of beer at our brewery and canned 251,016 cans of Sticky Hands. Our distribution team made over 10,000 deliveries, hauling 2,300,000 pounds of beer across the Pacific Northwest. We even recycled 20 pallets of PakTechs.
In our restaurants: 45,656 burgers spanked, 13,805 pretzels baked, 40,586 mushrooms stuffed for our Magic Mushrooms appetizer, and 2,571 cookies baked. We celebrated 732 birthdays with free desserts, served up 7,685 monthly specials, and mixed 5,481 fruit lemonades.
Employee Provision - Submissions Needed!
A weekly special served at the Pub, the idea of which comes primarily from Block 15 employees.
This week’s Employee Provision will be brought to you by Kelly! Swing by the Pub this Thursday for Latkes!
We’re always looking for more submissions, so send in those ideas! Remember, if your provision gets selected, you can order one for free!
This Week’s Releases
The Prophecies // Belgian Quadrupel // 10.30%
Inspired by a favorite Abbey quad enjoyed on a visit to Belgium. Blending specialty malts, dark Belgian candi sugar, & Abbey yeast, this beer has hints of dark fruit and Dutch cocoa with a rich yet delightful finish.
What are some highlights or changes for this beer?
Naturally conditioned in tank prior to canning, this beer is the strongest and most characterful of our abbey series beers.
Tasting Notes:
Raisin • Dutch Cocoa • Iconic
Availability: On draft and cans to-go + Distributed to our network in Oregon & SW Washington
Series: Orbital
This beer will be around a month or less.
What is a Belgian Quad?
An abbey beer sometimes referred to as “Belgian Strong Dark Ale,” the name Quad follows the convention of Dubbel and Tripel, each rising in strength. These beers are usually between 8% and 14% abv and feature a rich malt flavor, including plummy or figgy fruit notes, chocolate, caramel, and molasses. The characteristic Belgian yeast aromatics of baking spice and pear lean more to black pepper. These are rich but well-attenuated beers that are often highly carbonated, almost always attained with re-fermentation, or natural conditioning, where carbon dioxide from a second fermentation is captured to create the necessary balance and mouthfeel.
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Danger Hill // Hometown IPA // 6.80%
See the Marketing section for more info on this West Coast IPA collab with Hetty Alice!
Upcoming Releases
*This list is subject to change based on the production schedule. Please keep that in mind!
Check back next week!
Crowler/Package Sale for Sippin’ Sunday
20% off all packaged beer to-go, $5 Crowlers, and $10 Growler fills all-day Sunday of a specific beer.
This week’s beer is:
Both: Highland Hymn
Beer Education
Barrel Room Roundtable - Thursdays 4 pm
Topic: Away Team 3x BJCP - Dortmunder Export or Imperial IPA
Beer 101: Touch of Haze
By Garrison Schmidt, Head Brewer
You may notice that Sticky Hands and some of our other IPAs have been slightly hazier than normal recently. Great news, it’s by design!
The haze that you see is not from yeast, as is popularly believed, but from complex matrices of hop flavor and aroma compounds that remain in suspension in highly hopped (especially dry hopped) beer. Oils, resins, and other particulates don't fully settle out. We have traditionally fined (added ingredients to improve clarity) these beers to high heaven, but have found that the dropping of mild haze from our IPA is dampening the expression of the hops themselves, and that’s pretty unforgivable. We’ve chosen to reign back the finings, accept some haze, and present the best-smelling and tasting beer that we’ve ever made in exchange for a slight haze. So if you get a question from a customer about the increase in haze, just point out that it also comes with an increase in everything that they love about Block 15 IPA! A little is ok, but as usual, if you see a beer poured that you think doesn't look right, ask your bartender to pull you another. Only very select beers should ever be truly hazy, like Hazy IPA, wheat beers, etc., so always raise your hand if you have a question, and I’m always available to come to with quality questions, as well!
Happy holidays!
Marketing Updates
By Holly Amlin, Marketing & Creative Manager
We Made a Beer with our Friends at Hetty Alice Beers
Earlier this fall, our Head Brewer, Garrison, collaborated on a recipe with Gavin Lord, Founder and Brewer at Hetty Alice Beers in Portland. It turns out that, both gentlemen grew up in Silverton, Oregon, a town of about 10,000 people northeast of Salem.
Using their shared roots as inspiration, they decided to source ingredients from Silverton’s Goschie Farms, one of Oregon’s founding hop farms. They chose the juiciest strawberry-Squirt soda giving Strata hop lot ever, and second, a new project, Goschie Promise, which is barley grown by Gayle Goschie in Silverton and malted by Admiral Malting in California. It’s rich and decadent without being overpowering, just like a Willamette Valley upbringing.
For the name, Gavin explains the meaning, “East Main St. in Silverton includes a 20° hill, with a great big S in the middle that has been taunting young people on wheels for generations. Three times I challenged the hill, and three times it harvested my young flesh. I'm sure it got Garrison, too. It's also unpassable when frozen. Hence, at some point, a sign was installed. DANGER. HILL. The name stuck.”
The Beer
Danger Hill Hometown IPA. 6.8% ABV 100% HOMER. Pours like nostalgia with fluffy white foam. Fresh strawberry, grapefruit soda, and juicy citrus precede raspberry, brioche, and peach rings before a bright finish with just a kick of pine.
Read a little more about the collab from Gavin:
At 17, I hit the door running. I wanted to be anywhere where nobody knew my name. I wanted to ramble like Kerouac and gonzo like Thompson. I wanted to travel and learn and fight and love and find my people. And truth be told, I'm still chasing that ideal. It's funny though, after some time away, how what once felt like a cage begins to look more and more like a refuge. Garrison (Schmidt, Head Brewer at Block 15) and I grew up in Silverton, Oregon. Five miles and six years apart we were cut from the same textured cloth and later bit by the same Craft Beer bug. Here are some fun facts about other notable Silvertonians. Homer Davenport, born in Silverton in 1867 was the most prominent political cartoonist and satirist of his day. Don Petit, born in Silverton in 1955, is an Astronaut and Chemical Engineer who has accumulated 590 days in Space. Silverton is also home to the first Transgender Mayor in the History of the United States, Stu Rasmussen, (from whom I borrowed wigs for Halloween costumes and talent shows as a kid). Stu was elected twice in the 90's pre-transition and once in 2008, post transition, and described herself as a gender anarchist, using both he/him and she/her pronouns, and occasionally going by Carla Fong. Finally, in 1923, a couple from Silverton road tripped across the country to visit family in Indiana with their two year old Collie, Bobbie. While stopped for gas in Wolcott, Indiana, Bobbie was chased by three other dogs, and despite desperate efforts, after three days of searching the family was forced to return home. Then, somehow, Bobbie walked his ass the 2,551 miles back to Silverton. Verified the same dog (somehow) check ripley's believe it or not. Seems like Silverton wasn't so bad after all.
Events
From the Executive Chef
By Sarah Farey, Executive Chef
Bakery
Notes from Lindsey Henriksen, Bakery Manager
‘Tis the season: come get your peppermint hot cocoa cookies at the taproom while you can!
For January’s dessert, we’re looking at running another flavor of bread pudding. :)
Pub Updates
By Kira Sciarrotta, General Manager
HOPpy Holidays! We will not have a Weekly Quiz next week, consider it my holiday gift to you all :) With so many people being gone for the holidays, I will do my best to limit the amount of new information coming at you.
I’m SO sorry that the new board fell off the wall and many people missed it :’( I will leave the last question from last week's quiz the same to give everyone an opportunity to look at our awesome new board (assuming it decides to stay on the wall this week lol).
If you’re traveling this/next week, be safe and I look forward to seeing you back soon! If you’re staying in town and working so others can go home, thank you so very much and have a great time with your local friends and family.
For everyone working on Christmas Eve this year, please enjoy a full 70% credit on your meal, we really appreciate you all!
Special Drop-in from Marketing! New Beverage Menu Designs Launch this Friday
This Friday, you’ll start to see new beverage menus in circulation. The main change in this redesign is on the front of the menu with how we represent our beers. We’re moving away from organizing by style and instead organizing by our beer series, which relates to how the beers are offered.
When we went through a rebrand in 2022, we started categorizing our beers into series. You may have noticed these on our can labels, on our one sheets, and in the Brewsletter each week. As a team, we’ve been working to better define what these series mean, and we’re ready to share that with our customers through our menus.
With this arrangement, we hope to set good expectations with how long a beer is going to be around, highlighting which of our beers are here year-round and which are limited. Please familiarize yourself with this, as it will change how you guide our guests through our menu.
Beer Series
Perpetual: Year-round favorites. Available all the time.
Perennial: Returning seasonals released around the same time each year. Available for 1-3 months.
Orbital: Limited release. Brewed periodically. Available for a month or less.
Emerging: Exploratory and experimental. Available for a month or less.
Cellars: Extended aging in oak barrels. Availability depends on how much we make.
Synergy: Collaborations with friends of Block 15. Available for a month or less.
Pub Exclusives: Small and limited batches found only at our locations. Available for a very short period of time.
We’ve also added a QR code for customers to drop beer ideas for the brewery! Matt and the other brewery management will be reviewing these.
The backs of the menu also got an update. I’ve reorganized our non-alcoholic options to separate out the options that are 21+ only. Our previous “Guest Options” section has been reorganized by beverage type: Wine, Cider, and Gluten-Free options.
Since this is new, I’d love to hear feedback on it! Send me a slack, sling, or email. holly@block15.com. Thank you!
Tap Room Updates
There are lots of important Taproom specific updates coming the next couple of weeks, make sure you are being diligent in reading the read and sign every week and staying up to date on the happenings out here.
Be cool, be kind, and stay awesome.
Caves Updates
By Aidan Welch, General Manager
High Fives
Handsome James - Handsome James makes the best sandwiches, has a positive attitude, knows all the words to the hardest gangsta rap, and his vape smells like what I think rainbows smell like. Undeniably cool. I wanna be like James when I grow up.
If you have kudos or kind words you want to share about your co-worker anonymously in the Brewsletter, use the button below!
Staff Section
Check back next week!
Charitable Programs
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