Jester King Packaging Team

You may not know this, but we package all of our beer by hand. We’ve done it this way ever since we bottled our first beer in early 2011. No, packaging by hand doesn’t make our beer better. Natural re-fermentation in bottles, kegs, and casks sure as hell does, but the act of bottling by hand does not. But that’s not the point of this post.

The point is that we have an amazing team of hard working, dedicated, people who package our beer by hand week in and week out in a non-temperature controlled environment with a consistently great attitude. These people deserve a lot of credit for our beer. There’s absolutely no way we’d have had any success at all without them.

We work the same, simple setup for every packaging run. One person de-palletizes bottles, one rinses, one fills, one caps, one dries, one labels (if we have labels ready on bottling day), and one stacks them in cases or cages. It takes a crew of six or seven people a full day to package out 20 to 30 barrels of beer. You can see it all in action here. We’re not a large brewery, and we only package around 2,500 barrels per year. But this work adds up immensely, even for a brewery our size.

Our friend Tyler Malone of The Second Shooter recently photographed one of our packaging days. I think he did an incredible job capturing the nature and spirit of packaging at Jester King. Check out his work below, which is a much greater ode to the beating heart of Jester King Brewery than anything I could write.

Jeffrey Stuffings
Founder
Jester King Brewery