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The holiday’s are a busy time for everybody, with the shortened week and all. We are pretty busy here! The next batch of Schokolade Bock will be ready next monday, and bottled on Tuesday. I can’t wait, given that everybody elses Christmas beers are out. I have tried Redhooks winter ale this year, and it was pretty darn good! I always have like Redhook, I just wish I could get their IPA on a regular basis around here. I also picked up some of Boulevards Nutcracker ale.. but it wasn’t as amazing as I thought it was last year. Some of the other winter ales are kind of boring. I like the fact that we stick with a traditional beer style rather than just dumping nutmeg in our beer, I mean, who wants to drink alot of nutmeg?

By the way, beer is good for you! In the new issue of the New Brewer they have a great article about the health benefits of beer. They also have some interesting beer statics. For one, 70% of people have never heard of the health benefits of beer! Beer is just as good for you for wine, maybe even better! Mostly, its just the alcohol in a beverage that prevents heart disease. Alcohol consumed in moderation, of course. Beer also has more nutrition than wine, it provides essential salts such as potassium and magnesium (so drink one after a working out). It also is better at providing anti-oxidants, even though red wine has more anti-oxidants than beer. The ones in wine are large molecule and are not as easily absorbed (and dark beer has the most anti-oxidants of any beer!).

So spread the good news! The bad news is that the vast majority of people in America think that teen drinking is on the rise, when it actually has been steadily declining since the 80’s. I think you can blame that on the nightly news, not beer!

Well the beer tasting at the Motley Cow in Iowa City was wonderful. The food and beer was very well paired. Those belgian beers still surprise even me with their variety of flavors. Doug had Eric Neilsen on hand, who had been to just about all of the breweries whose beer was served, and had a great story about each .

My favorite was the first course, sweet potato fries and garlic sausages, matched with a tasty mustard seed belgian ale hopped with challenger hops. It really singed together. The sweet potato fries looked liked cooked carrots, but were much more yummy in flavor and texture.

What really amazed me is the size of some of the breweries. Eric claimed that the first brewery only had a barrel and half system. That is so small, they must sell nearly all of their beer here in the states! Another brewery was only run on weekends, and had a twenty or so barrel system. That just boggles my mind. We make 60 to 100bbls a week here, and sell all of our beer right here in Iowa. The idea of exporting to belgium has never even crossed my mind. I figure that the people of belgium must not want the beer that they are famous for. Also I imagine Americans are willing and able to pay a higher price than than the rest of Europe. Though it still doesnt make much sense to me. But then again, I wish I could get 20 dollars for a single bottle of my beer!

That aside, I look forward to doing a beer tasting with our beers soon. Stay tuned!

Also I have found the source of the Stone City rumor, so you don’t need to email me about it anymore. All I can say is that it is a group of businessmen from Solon. I will be talking with them in the near future to give them some advice…..

Stout is the slowest of all the brews that we make. We actually only brew 18bbls at time rather than the usual 20bbls. Our mash tun simply can’t handle any more grain than that. Once, we did a beer club order for stout, and I was able to toy with the recipe. I discovered that the trouble we have with making this beer is in the oat flakes. I tried to increase the oats to 10% of the grist… that did NOT work. So now we keep the oats at only 5%, and the run off still takes 4 and half hours! Compare that to about 2 hours for Wheat or Pilsner. Oh well, I guess every drop is worth it!

Its time to make a hop order. As I feared prices for Hallertau hops from Germany have increased dramatically from 4.00$ a pound up to 5.50 a pound. Well we will see how the quality is when I get the hops. Atleast they have some to sell!

Thanks to the THIRSTY homebrew club yet again. We had their homebrew monthly meeting here tonight. I gave them all a tour of the brewery, and they got to watch me finish up the stout brew. Then they tasted all the left over samples from the homebrew competition. They made a long boring stout brew quite a bit more fun!

Someone brought in a bottle of Moose Drool in its new aluminum bottle. Its a really nice package, but I hear it costs two to three times what a glass bottle costs, so don’t expect us to switch over any time soon. I would love to get the glass out of brewery, just because of the mess though. Broken glass from bottling clogs up our drains several times a year.

Someone else brought a bottle of 100% Spelt beer from the Michigan Brewing Co. It was very light, with no malt body at all. I would only drink it if I became allergic to barley. Apparently, some people are allergic, and that is why they are making it.

Well thats it. Tommorrow night is the Johns Grocery Belgian Beer dinner. I can’t wait!

Well last night was a party. A slow sticky mash party. In our 24hr brew marathon, the third batch of Bock started to run off slow, and then slowed down to nothing. This is the ultimate brewhouse nightmare. Thankfully I have had this happen before, twice, in my entire brewing career. It was always with stouts though, so this is a first. The first two brews were 5-6 hour runoffs, so I knew things were going slow. We think that this is not a good batch of Munich malt. It seems to have high protein and beta-glucan levels. We made 60bbls last month without much of a problem, but that was a different lot number of malt. This doesn’t mean it won’t make good beer, heck, it might be great for flavor, but bad for lautering in the brewhouse.

I managed to get 3 bbls into the kettle before it the mash stuck. I mean stuck, nothing coming out. The bed was not even really tight. I thought that the black malt might have been blinding the screens, so I underletted (pushed water back up through the screens). Recirculated. Runoff. And damn if it didnt just slow down to nothing again after one full grant. I repeated this 4 times, and I managed to get 6 bbls of 16 degree plato wort into the kettle. I started running off at 10pm and stopped at 4am. That is 1 bbl of wort an hour!

Since my final target gravity was 15 plato, I added a barrel and a half of water, accounting for the half bbl of water that will evaporate during the boil, and brought it to a boil. Now the fun part was graining out. This wasn’t as bad as I have had before… when it will not drain at all, you can have quite a bit of water in the lauter tun. Then I have had to take the door off, and dump the mash all over the place, like the bursting of a dam. It makes an unbelievable mess. But this time I was able to let it drain enough, and it was ok. The grain was very sticky and wet, though, and it took two cart fulls to empty the lauter tun because of all the extra liquid. The first cart full was so heavy, I was only barely able to scoot it across the floor, and I think i’m a fairly strong guy!

Well I was happy I managed to save a half batch. Chris came in to relieve me at 5:30am, and I didn’t want to have to come back 12 hrs later, so I never even bothered to mash in the 4th batch. 25 bbls will have to do, we can always do another ten bbls later on. All of our beers have been slow to run off with the new malt. Hopefully this is the last of the 2002 malt and we will soon be moving to 2003 malt. 2002 was an awful year for protien levels in malt, and I can not wait to see it go. Brewing can be a real pain sometimes, but I still love it. Hey, I have another war story to tell now. If you think this is bad its really not, I have a friend who got a stuck mash and had so much suction under the screens, he managed to bend his lauter tun screens! Now thats bad!

Well after many days of waiting, we finally bottled the Schokolade Bock today. We only did 60 cases. I’m afraid there is going to be a Bock shortage. So you better hurry up and get your Bock now! Dan, our salesman, has gotten quite a few tap accounts with this beer… So we may run short on bottled product. However I am pulling an all nighter on thursday night to make a double batch. Sometimes you just got to buckle down and get the beer made. I just hate to run out of beer. It makes everyone around here cranky!

I’m going to enter this beer into the world beer cup this winter. I can’t decide if our Schokolade Bock should go in as a Traditional Bock or as Schwarz Beer. Its been a long time since I’ve had a Schwarz(black) Beer. I’m afraid this beer is too dark to do well in the Bock category, and maybe too sweet/malty to do well in the Schwarzbier category. If any beer judges are reading this, let me know what you think. If it doesn’t fit in either of these categories, well, where does it go then? Nowhere?

This is a problem we have with many of our beers. Our Oatmeal Stout for example, is too mild to fit into any of the 5 categories for Stout, and may not have even enough black malt to fit into the Robust Porter category. Its a great beer, its just too mild to fit into the styles that are dominated by ‘big’ stouts and porters. When it costs about 150$ to enter a beer into one of these contests, you really have to think about it. The world cup is only held once every two years so i’m really anxious to get some beers entered into it. A GABF medal is great, but a World Cup Medal, competing against all the breweries of Europe, is simply the best!