Crane’s Castle Brewing: Community-Minded, Family-Friendly Brewery

Crane's Caste Brewing, located in the heart of East Bremerton, offers a welcoming and vibrant space for the community to gather. With a spacious indoor taproom, a family-friendly atmosphere featuring games like cornhole and mini bowling, and a pet-friendly outdoor beer garden, it's the perfect spot for any occasion. Enjoy rotating food trucks, bring your own bites, or join one of their many events. Committed to inclusivity and community engagement, Crane's Caste Brewing invites you to sip, relax, and even join their exclusive membership program for added perks. DeliveryRank finds out more.

Your brewery's name, Crane's Castle, reflects your German heritage and family history in brewing. How does that legacy influence your approach to crafting beers today, and are there specific brewing traditions or techniques you strive to preserve or reinvent? 

The new generation of owners purchased Crane's Castle back in June 2023. Our goal has always been to maintain the warm, welcoming atmosphere and everyone's favorite beers from the original brewery. We are also dedicated to offering a wide selection of both American and European styles, while incorporating some newer and more original recipes to keep up with trends in today's craft beer market. The 2 award winners will always be available on tap here at Crane's Castle, but you'll also find some of our own originals such as the Wake the Dead stout which uses coffee brewed by a local coffee shop and the Moonshot Blackberry Belgian Wit which also has some local ties in its origins. 

Your Tivoli Vienna Lager won a gold medal at the 2022 WA Beer Awards. What sets this lager apart, and how do you approach creating beers that stand out in a highly competitive craft beer Scene? 

Vienna lagers are slightly darker in color, and a bit maltier than their German counterparts. Ours in particular has a very nice, crisp, clean finish, and it comes out crystal clear without the use of finings or centrifuges that are typically employed by other breweries. It's meant to please a number of different beer palettes and perhaps may even allow people who don't typically drink beer to enjoy it. While we aren't entirely sure how the original owner approached creating this beer, we have made sure to keep true to this recipe so that people can continue to enjoy it exactly how it's been made all along. As for future competitions, we plan to take a fairly simple approach - create beers that we and our customers enjoy drinking. If it's flying out of the taps, that's a good sign that it will be successful. 

Crane's Castle is known for its family-friendly beer hall and involvement in community events. How do you balance being a community hub with running a successful business, and what has been the most rewarding community initiative so far? 

Our community is what keeps us in business, and we love that we get to participate in as many efforts as we can to help support Kitsap county as much as we can. One of our most rewarding community initiatives is our December Night Market. Every year, we put out a call to local artists, small business owners, and crafters to come together, set up their booths, and sell their wares as the people of Bremerton will hopefully get a little holiday shopping done in the process. We love being the venue for local creatives as well to give them a solid platform to showcase their work. As we too are also a small business, the event is very much about helping each other out and setting the holiday cheer mood for the rest of the season. 

Your brewery emphasizes crafting small-batch beers that highlight local ingredients. What is your process for selecting these ingredients, and how does this commitment to local sourcing shape the flavors and identity of your beers? 

We do our best to incorporate as many local ingredients into our beers as possible. Jared, one of our owners and our head brewer, puts together a great list of brews, and whenever we can reach out to other businesses to incorporate their products into our beers we do. A great example of this is our Wake the Dead stout, which features coffee from Hollydays Coffee House in Port Orchard. Our Moonshot Blackberry Wit is a fruited beer with blackberries that are sourced right here in Kitsap County. Additionally, the after products of the beer making process like the spent grain are sent off to local farmers around Kitsap County to help feed their animals and fertilize fields. We do our best to keep ourselves connected to our community and to make them feel as much part of the beer-making (and drinking!) process as possible. 

As an independent brewery in an evolving industry, what challenges have you faced in maintaining your authenticity, and how do you see the future of Crane's Castle in the larger craft beer landscape? 

While we do hope to expand enough to see our kegs on taps throughout Kitsap county and maybe even all throughout the greater Seattle area, we never intend to lose sight of our original mission of being a fun, open space dedicated to supporting our community. We love beer as much as we love the people who truly make Crane's Castle thrive. And, no matter how much we manage to expand, we don't intend to ever lessen our customer experience right at our brewery. 

If you would like to find out more about Crane’s Castle Brewing, please visit https://cranescastlebeer.com/