Following up on yesterday's super cool news that we were named one of the "Top 10 New Breweries In The World" by RateBeer is this cool little visual.

RateBeer released their "Best of" by region today, and I couldn't help but notice that we're in pretty good company. Being the top new brewery in California is rad, but when you're mentioned alongside these guys, it's hard not to geek out.

Well, I woke up to a pretty rad surprise: RateBeer selected us as one of their top 10 new breweries of 2013! This is quite an honor, both because the folks at RateBeer are exceedingly savvy and because 2,600 breweries were eligible. So for us to take the 9th spot is really an honor.

Surprise! Pretty wild. We’re stoked.

Here’s the deal: a couple of months ago, the folks developing The North Parker building at the corner of 30th St and Upas got in touch with me. They thought we might be a good fit for the last remaining commercial space on the ground floor of the building.

I was highly skeptical, and in fact, I didn’t return their call for a month. I wasn’t even remotely in the market for another project, being plenty busy with our existing tasting room and, ya know, running the brewery, which is only six months old and needier than a dozen shrieking baby marmots.

But I ended up meeting with them, and, well, here we are, announcing our second tasting room, The North Park Flavordome.

Last week we tapped a very special beer at the Lomaland Fermentorium that has been many months in the making: Black House with bourbon barrel-aged coffee beans. I’m 100% confident that we are the first brewery to make such a beer, so we’ve understandably heard some requests to explain how we made it.

Here’s the basic premise: green (unroasted) coffee beans are extremely porous, and consequently, pick up aromas and flavors from their environment easily. Quality-focused coffee importers and roasters are hyper-sensitive to this issue, and go to great lengths to ensure that their green beans are not exposed to undesirable aromas during shipping and storage.

So this is something we've been wanting to do ever since we first glimpsed the vast interior of the Lomaland Fermentorium. It's such a perfect space to show movies, it just begs for it. And once we realized that the giant white cold box would be towering over one corner of the tasting room, we knew we HAD to do it.

Well, now we're ready to make movie nights really happen. We got a screen, a sweet projector, and a killer sound system installed, and let me tell you, the results are frickin' sweet. The picture quality is gorgeous and the sound is crystal clear. We're so stoked for you all to check it out.

Today, we officially launched in L.A.! Well, not just L.A. actually, but Santa Barbara and Ventura, too. We're incredibly stoked about the whole thing. So much so, in fact, that we had Roastface Killah Amy make this cockstaggering poster to commemorate this momentous occasion.

We also have a slew of radical events planned, so you can meet us and try all our beer and stuff:

The end of the calendar year marks almost 6 months in operation for Modern Times. Since everyone loves lists and this milestone seems like a reasonable time to take stock, here are 5 things we accomplished in 2013.

1. We opened the brewery…Holy crap, that was a lot of work. I left my job at Stone on January 13th, 2012 to start working on Modern Times. A little less than 18 months later, we kicked off our launch week on July 8th, 2013. By that point there were 5 of us, and I had aged 1,000 years.