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here. I only wish I had time to taste ALL of the entries. They were very good. The brewer of the ‘eisbock’ confided in me that he had almost thrown out the beer twice! So let that be a lesson, never toss out your homebrew, it gets better with age! Unfortunately we commercial brewers don’t have room to do that. Our mistakes go down the drain.

I just realized that I have neglected to mention the recent loss of a local brewery. Stone City Brewing of Solon IA closed for good on Oct 31st. They had a Halloween party, and went out with a bang. But really its a bust for the local brew scene. We have lost a brewery in this state every year for the last three years. First we lost Saint’s Brewpub in des moines. Then we lost 4th St brewing in Souix City. Now Stone City, the only other distributing Microbrewery in this state. In their place we have gained a few nameless, uninteresting brewpubs who either have no brewer, or no real personality (atleast that I am aware of). Its a real shame.

Jeff and Sal Allen of Stone City had great personality, and the will to try the seemingly impossible, to make a small Microbrewery viable in Iowa. There was no food, it was all about the beer. I can tell you its damn tough. We get by here with the help of our nice location here in the Amanas.

I want to thank Jeff and Sal for the amount of education they put into the beer scene in iowa. They turned many people on to microbrew that would not have really discovered it on their own. I know, because I was one of them!

I also have to thank them for helping me get my boost into this industry. In 1999 I was a homebrewer who wanted to attend the Siebel Institute of Brewing Technology to learn to be a true brewmaster. The instructors there told me that the more experience I had the more I would learn from their courses. So with only a few months remaining before classes started, in the spring of 1999, took as much vacation as I could from my current job at the University of Iowa to volunteer at the brewery. My co-workers thought I was crazy to get up at 4:30 in the morning on my day off to go and shovel grain in the brewery. (for those of you who missed it, it got REAL HOT up there by the mash tun when they were graining out the brew. Jeff called it the ‘free sauna’.) I not only did it, but I loved it! It was so creative and different from the boring labwork I was doing at my old job. Volunteering confirmed that my commitment to switch to this field was the right decision for me.

Much later, in the winter of 1999, I got first job because the owner of a brewpub in Wisconsin called up Jeff Allen as a reference. I had been struggling for months to get a job in the industry with no ‘real’ experience. It was my first big break, that eventually led to me being here (back in Iowa, another strange story). One good thing led to another.

Well so long and thanks for all the beer. I hope that we can help serve some of the beer that is now missing from Iowa. And I truly hope that someone else has the balls to open up another ‘real’ brewery around here.