FuzzyBrew

Mississippi’s Lucky Town Brewing Company will celebrate the launch of its beers with a release party in Jackson on Saturday, Dec. 15.

The party will be held at the Underground 119 in Downtown Jackson and will feature Lucky Town’s first two beers. Pints of “Ballistic Blonde,” a Belgian-style blonde ale, and “The Flare Incident,” a maple and brown sugar oatmeal stout, will be served.

The beer will start flowing at 6:30 p.m., with live music from Bryan Lee, aka the Braille Blues Daddy, starting at 9 p.m. A cover charge will be in effect at 8 p.m.

For more details, check out the Facebook event page.

In September, Lucky Town announced that it had agreed to terms with a contract brewery and purchased a 30-barrel fermenting tank as it continued to plan for its own brewing facility in Mississippi. Under the agreement, Alabama’s Back Forty Beer Co. will brew and package Lucky Town’s beers. Lucky Town, meanwhile, will be responsible for beer recipes, distribution, sales and marketing.

The Lucky Town team plans to eventually open a brewery in the Jackson area.

Lucky Town Brewing Company announced this week that it’s agreed to terms with a contract brewery as Lucky Town continues to plan for its own brewing facility in Mississippi.

Lucky Town has selected Alabama’s Back Forty Beer Co., which will brew and package Lucky Town’s beers. Lucky Town, meanwhile, will be responsible for beer recipes, distribution, sales and marketing, according to a release.

We chose to go with contract brewing for several reasons. 1) Brewing can be expedited as there is no need to wait on our own facility to be designed, built, and approved. 2) Lucky Town’s beers can be tested in the market while we are working on our production facility. 3) Having our beer in the market will allow us to range sales and accurately size our production equipment to meet demand.

The Lucky Town team plans to open Mississippi’s second brewery in the Jackson area.

In March, through the Kickstarter fundraising website, Lucky Town raised $22,304 to open a microbrewery, exceeding its goal. With proceeds from Kickstarter supporters, Lucky Town recently purchased its first 30-barrel fermenting tank, a 12-foot tall stainless steel vessel that will be used to ferment Lucky Town’s first batches of beer. The tank (seen in the photo below) has already been installed at Back Forty’s brewery in Gadsden.

As distribution grows, we will begin adding additional tanks at Back Forty’s facility to accommodate the demand which will allow Lucky Town to brew more styles simultaneously. Once Lucky Town’s brewery is built, all of our fermenters will then be moved from Back Forty’s facility into our very own facility here in Mississippi.

Lucky Town has also signed distribution agreements with three in-state distributors — Capital City Beverages, F.E.B. Distributing, and Stokes Distributing — providing coverage from the Jackson Area to the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

Keep an eye on Facebook, Twitter and Lucky Town’s website for the latest news on the craft beer start-up.

Tickets are on sale for the 3rd Annual Top of the Hops ­Beer Fest in Jackson, which will be held July 28 at the Jackson Convention Complex.

And thanks to a change in state law, the festival will be the first in Mississippi to feature higher-gravity beers.

More than 150 different beers will be available at the event, which runs from 4 to 8 p.m., and patrons can get unlimited 2-oz. samples.

General admission tickets are $35 in advance and can be purchased online. A limited number of VIP tickets are available for $75, which includes entrance to the festival an hour early, access to a VIP area, beer tasting selections not available to general admission ticket holders and complimentary food from 4-7 p.m.

In April, Governor Phil Bryant has signed a bill, effective July 1, that raises the alcohol-by-weight limit in beer from 5% to 8%,

The Mobile Press-Register had a nice story last week on Lucky Town Brewing Company, which is in the midst of a Kickstarter project to raise funds to become a commercial brewery.

Lucky Town, based in Jackson, Miss., would be the state’s second craft brewery. Through its Kickstarter project, Lucky Town is asking for $20,000 but has a higher goal of $40,000 for start-up funds.

For now, Lucky Town Brewing Company is a “very well put-together concept,” says Lucas Simmons, brewmaster for the yet-to-be brewery. He’s been homebrewing for nearly nine years, but it wasn’t until he took home awards for stout and overall high gravity beer at the 2010 Outlaw Homebrew Competition in Hattiesburg that an old college friend from Mississippi State suggested he pursue it as a career.

That friend, Chip Jones, is now distribution and sales manager for Lucky Town. Special Events Coordinator Angela Blackburn and R&D Manager Brandon Blacklidge fill out the four-person team, who are all in their late 20s or early 30s and “who kind of merged into something more [than friends],” according to Simmons. “It’s kind of been fortuitous that we’re friends, but that on top of that, we’re all hard-working and very motivated and contribute different things.”

Read the full story at al.com. And check out the video below from the folks at Lucky Town.