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Wow, we have been doing quite well lately. We ran out of packaged beer over the Christmas holiday. We had to do an quick bottling run on monday. Now all my bright tanks are empty, and I have to clean them all and get them filled by next week! This would be easy, but the New Years holiday is going to get in the way. I sure do miss my summer help! We have to do everything ourselves in the winter. We even let the Hospitality salesroom help go next week, because there just are not enough customers in Amana in the dead of winter. That means everytime the door rings, someone has to run upstairs or downstairs to go answer it. We get plenty of exercise around here

Our white ale is quitely fermenting downstairs. The fermentation is going slower than I had hoped, because it has been difficult to keep the little batch of beer warm in our cellar. Its almost done. Thankfully this yeast is not very flocculant, so there are plenty of yeast in solution. Its just chilly for them, and they are moving slow on eating up those last few sugars in the beer. This is a problem we have with doing half batches. Its actually easier to make full or double batches of beer in the winter, because the heat of fermentation is so much more, it actually warms the beer. Just like you do, yeast create heat when they work!

But don’t look for it stores just yet. We are still waiting on ATF label approval. That could take a month, easy. We expect demand for this beer to be high at first, so we are going to make a second batch with the yeast I will harvest out of this batch. I’m also going to tweak the recipe a bit. Last time the floating orange peel clogged up our heat exchanger! I managed to get in unclogged, but Chris had to spend a day dissassembling it and making sure it was actually clean. It was time to clean it anyway. We are going to have get a mill to grind this stuff down to a powder, like our hops.

I think this beer is going to be very good. I had a Hoegaarden on tap at the Map Room in Chicago this weekend, and it tasted very close to what we have produced. The bitter orange peel is the key, it provides a balance, I could really taste it in the Hoegaarden.

This Friday we will be making the very first brew of John’s Grocery Generations White Ale. Doug over at John’s has moved the brand to us after the closure of the Stone City Brewing Co. I’m very excited about making this beer, because it presents several new challenges for us.

First is the new ingredients of Coriander and Orange Peel. I have been spending the last weeks trying to find suppliers of these ingredients. In the process I have discovered that there are several different types of orange peel. First there is Curacao or bitter orange peel. This is from the Curacao bitter orange popularly grown in Seville Spain for use in marmalades. It has an intense orange aroma, but it also provides a vegetable bitterness that is supposedly important in balancing the tartness of this style of beer. Celis white or Hoegaarden would be the two best examples of beers using this peel.

The other peel is sweet orange peel. No one seems to be sure just exactly what type of orange this comes from. I guess it’s basically the same as the peel you find in supermarkets. Some homebrewers warn against using supermarket peels, as they can lead to of flavors. What am I to make of that? I’m not sure, maybe they aren’t peeling them right? I have heard that Blue Moon uses the peel from the Valencia orange, but suppliers I talk to don’t seem to know which type of orange the peel comes from. I’m getting several samples of sweet peel from different suppliers so I can compare price and quality. Thankfully the brewing community has come through for me and I have list of quality suppliers who fellow brewers have used to make medal winning beers!

Coriander is the last new ingredient. I was suprised to learn that this actually provides much of the citrus flavor of the beer. I had always assumed that it provided some sort of other flavor, like uh, coriander-flavor… But after reading up on it, I now know that it is actually the seed from the Cilantro plant. The seeds are quite spicy and citrus like. If we get whole coriander seeds, we are going to have to find some way of grinding them up. Using whole seeds would be preferable because that way the taste is fresher, like freshly ground coffee.

The recipe I have from jeff makes no mention of the addition times for all these spices, so I may have some fun figuring that out. Right now I’m thinking the later I add the spices, the better. I will probably add the majority of them into the whirlpool tank. That way much of the flavor will not evaporate off during the boil. We will have to see how the first batch tastes and go from there I guess.

We also will have a new yeast. For the first batch i’m going with white labs WLP400 belgium wit strain. This is not the same strain as was used by Stone City. Amazingly, they used the WLP300 strain which is the same strain we used in our Hefeweizen last year. There is huge difference between the way we handle our yeast and the way Stone City used to handle theirs. I think this was evident in the difference between our Hefewiessen and their wheat beer. As far as I can tell, the grain bills for those two beers was very similar, and they where both made with WLP300. But they tasted nothing alike. In particular, Stone City’s beer was much thinner and tarter than ours. Going with that evidence I am comfortable trying the WLP400 strain out. I want this beer to be tart, and Jeff said that when he tried this strain the Wit was way too tart.

The final challenge will be the used of flaked wheat in the brewhouse. We already have a tough time with our oatmeal stout and its flaked oats. Supposedly, flaked wheat is much easier to deal with. I sincerely hope so, or I will be having a long friday night here at the brewery!

I expect the first batch will be in the bottle as soon as the first week of January. Well, maybe. It will depend mostly on how long it takes the ATF to approve the new labels. We have to get new labels, because it must have our name on them as the brewer and not Stone City.

Last night I had quite a good time sampling out my beer at the Marion Hivee. This is really something we need to do more often, but don’t. People really enjoying meeting the brewmaster, and many people think they have had our beer, but actually have not tried it since I took over the brewery. They are often quite surprised by how good our beer is.

I enjoy telling people i’m the brewer. Many of them look at me incredulously, and seem to think that i’m far to young. Where did this notion that brewers are crusty old men come from? I find it quite bizzare. But then most peoples preconcieved notions about beer are pretty far off from the truth anyway.

One group of people actually thought it was us that went out of business. They said they heard that the Millstream Brewing Company in Solon went under. I think that is pretty indictive of how little many people are here know about the local brewing scene. Well I guess there really is not much to know, but it still shocks me when they get it wrong.

Also at the tasting event was John Leinenkugel, one of the three Leinenkugel brothers. After the event I had a chance to have him sample our beers. I have to say, he seemed quite impressed. Infact, his interest in talking to me really perked up after he tried my beers. He said they are very clean beers, which is always a good comment to hear. After that we had an enjoyable but short conversation.

Of couse the first thing I asked him about was whether they still made Leinenkugel’s Northwoods Lager. This is probably the best beer they ever made, and it is getting hard to find. He said that yes, they did plan to do away with it someday, but that it was the brewmasters favorite beer, so that won’t anytime soon. But their barrelage on that brand has gone from 10,000 to only 6000 bbls a year. Not a good sign!

I asked how his new product, Leine Amber Light was doing. He said sales were flat, but he really believed that the low calorie categorie was a market that was going to grow dramatically in the future. I am no fan of that category, but we agreed that it was one that micro’s should be present in. If people are going to count their calories, then at the very least we can provide a beer that doesn’t taste exactly like carbonated water *cough* michelob ultra *cough*.

He said that they were looking to break even for the year. This made me feel pretty good, because that is what we are looking to do this year. August/September were not very good for sales, though the last month has been doing very good. He said that the Leinenkugel Creamy Dark was doing very well, and was definately a success. I told him I thought it was a pretty good name (though i’m no real fan of the beer) because to call it Leinenkugel Dark Lager (which is what it is) would be an instant failure.

Overall I found him to be a really great guy. I was particularly surprised when he refered to an aisle stack of Miller and Bud products as the ‘evil empire’. It really made me laugh, as I would have thought that would be verboten, considering that Leinenkugels is 100% owned my Miller (and Miller is now owned by the South African Brewing conglomerate). He seemed to be really just like any other microbrewery owner, and we completely agreed that we all have to work together as much as possible to grow our market to 10% market share. Well John said 5%, but he agreed that microbrewers holding a 2% share of the beer market is untenable. Imports, remember, hold a 17% share of the market, and budweiser alone has a round 50% of the market.

On Saturday at 5pm, I will be at the New Pioneer Coop in downtown Iowa City doing another tasting. I invite you to come help me grow this market, one taste at time.

Yes, that is what we are becoming. My back is sore from bottling.. lets see… 365 cases of soda pop. Multiply that by 24 bottles in case, and I single handedly took 8760 bottles of root beer and cream soda of the bottling line today. WOW. It looks like this year we may actually produce more root beer than beer. We don’t even market it, it just sort of grows on its own. When I first started working here, I think we only produced about 500 barrels of root beer. This year we should break 1000 barrels. It provides a steady income for us.

However I do not want this place to become a root beer factory. Yes that is something that is said around here when we have trouble making beer, in a sarcastic fashion. Root beer is easy to make, but it has a very thin profit margin. Real sugar is incredibly expensive, and it is what makes our root beer so very good. But it makes our margin so small, that there is no real hope of selling our root beer outside the state, as the margin left to a distributor is not particularly pleasing. Especially so with the huge margins that are made of corn syrup derived soda’s. Yes it really does cost only penny’s to make the Coke or Pepsi in a twelve pack that you pay 5$ for. More importantly, Root beer does not earn us enough money to pay for the expansion of equipment that will be required to keep expanding our output of it. Making that much more beer however, would really put us in the money!

So we keep making it, but we do not spend any advertising money on it. Plus, I didn’t go to pop school. There is no mystery in making root beer, and it really does not hold my attention. I’m not in this for the money, although getting paid is nice, i’m in it for the fun of creating good beer. It so happens that making good beer is extremely challenging, and that is what I like. So i’ll leave it to the Jones and Sobe of the world (who are all owned by huge companies now, Pespi owns Sobe) to make pop.

Well i’m going to send in my Schild Brau today to the USBTC. That is short for the United States Beer Tasting Championship. www.usbtc.com. Doug over at Johns Grocery in Iowa City received an award for his Belgian White ale, as the best Belgian Wit in the Midwest. I’m not sure how many beers he was up against, but I imagine there must have been a few. Aren’t they making Celis White in Michigan now? Of course Pizza Port in California took the award in the National category. That is a truly amazing brewery. He suggests I enter my Schild Brau in the Amber Lager category. I see that Eliot Ness from the Great Lakes Brewing Co took the award in that category last year. Well that is a good beer, I have had it myself, so I would love to see how the Schild Brau does up against it. I’m still pretty pumped up about winning the GABF bronze medal.

I really respect beer competitions where there are not too many medals awarded. This USBTC just does one award per category, which is nice. I have to say my least favorite one is the All About Beer sponsored World Beer Championships. They give ‘ratings’ like 89 or 90, and anything above say 90 is a gold medal. This is how many wine competitions work. It dilutes the award because they may be giving away ten gold medals out of twenty entries. Because of this I don’t even pay attention to medals on wine labels. But when someone wins a medal at the GABF it is a big deal. They only give away three medals per category and sometimes no medal at all if they feel like none of the entries are deserving. To make the World Beer Championships even worse, you can just pay to have your rating from last year resubmitted into the magazine the following year. That is just plain advertising!

Its really not an accident that many breweries win repeated medals at the GABF or World Beer Cup year after year. This a sign that they are truly great and consistent brewers. Often times you will see that some breweries win again and again, and then drop of the winner lists after a few years. Its always because the people who made that beer excellent have left the brewery. You can see the same thing at our award history. We are beginning to turn this place around!