Great South Bay Brewery Officially Opens In Bay Shore, N Y

After years of planning, Great South Bay Brewery is open for business. A labor of love for Doctor Rick Sobotka, practicing anesthesiologist at Southside Hospital in Bay Shore, NY, has finally turned from a dream into a reality. Working the local Long Island beer festivals for a year to get the name out and using grassroots and digital marketing has turned out a buzz about the brewery that could not be ignored.

Great South Bay Brewery was invited as a last minute addition to this past year's "Tap NY Beer and Food Festival" in Hunter, NY where the brewery's Massive IPA (a well-balanced, hopped up India Pale Ale made from American two-row pale malt, crystal malt, flaked oats, and four different hops) took home the Bronze Medal for third best craft beer in New York State. Great South Bay was also invited to present their beers at this year's Brewers Association event "SAVOR - A Beer and Food Experience", where the beer was served along-side top names in the craft beer community such as Dogfish Head, Stone, The Bruery and many others.

In addition to the award winning Massive IPA, the brewery produces an array of other styles such as their Blonde Ambition Ale (an easy drinking, all pilsner malt blonde ale flavored with apricot), Snaggletooth Stout (a hearty American stout brewed with chocolate malt, roasted barley, Long Island apples, cinnamon, and licorice root), Great South Bay Lager (a Vienna style lager with some minor modifications), and their newest seasonal ale ; Splashing Pumpkin (a take on the traditional pumpkin ale brewed with roasted pumpkin puree and seasoned slightly with cinnamon and cloves). The brewers at Great South Bay are also hard at work on some new ideas such as their Hoppocratic Oath (an imperial IPA), a Belgian style Saison, and a Bourbon Barrel Aged Stout.

Rick Sobotka is a fourth generation brewer who has been making beer for nearly his entire life. Learning the art of homebrewing from his father, Rick has spent years honing his skills and crafting incredibly drinkable beers. With the addition of head brewer Greg Maisch in September of 2009, they began to set up the brewery in an old motorcycle shop just north of Main Street in Bay Shore. Since then they have been brewing one barrel batches to help get the brewery off the ground before construction begins on their thirty barrel brewery which should break ground in January of 2011.

Great South Bay Brewery has already begun to see the success of their beers at the local Bay Shore craft beer watering hole, TJ Finley's, where the brewery had their launch party on September 11th. Within 4 hours of tapping the beers, 100 gallons of beer was imbibed by the hundreds of people that came out to support the highly anticipated release of the brewery's beers for sale in pints. The beers were well received and has kept the bar patrons watering at the mouth for more. After hearing of this success, Great South Bay was approached by local distribution company Clare Rose (Budweiser, Blue Point, Goose Island) who were looking to expand their craft beer portfolio. After some talks, Clare Rose and Great South Bay had reached an agreement for distribution in Suffolk and Nassau Counties.

Last week, Great South Bay Brewery rolled out their largest batch of beer to date in partnership with Clare Rose to distributed all over Long Island. The brewery's plan is to keep the distribution local for the time being to saturate the Long Island market and help spread the word about craft beer to the nearly four million inhabitants of the suburban sandbar east of New York City. Keep a close eye on these guys as there will be more to come from them in 2011 as their brewery grows larger and begins to reach out further then the beaches and bays of Long Island.

The brewery is draft only at the moment but plans to be bottl