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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!

We just finished bottling 120 cases of the second batch of bock. This batch is slightly more dry than the last batch. We will see, it usually mellows out a bit more in a week after it is bottled. Its quite yummy. So now we have plenty of bock and hopefully you will see it in a store near you.

The season is slowing down for us, and I feel like we are finally gettting caught up on beer. Its nice not making the pilsner, as it is one less thing to keep in stock. Now I can use the pilsner bright beer tank to hold the bock. That seems more appropriate than using a lager tank. We still have 8 kegs of pilsner left, and we haven’t brewed any since august, so I feel like I have been already proven right; it does not sell well in the winter.

All we have to do is get through this week and then we can do some maintence. First thing is to re weld the bottle rinser to accept long necks. This will allow us to do contract beers that already have long neck packaging. Chris is a resouceful guy, and he has found a way to modify our current rinser for something like a 100 bucks. This is amazing, as we were looking at spending ten to twenty times that amount to get a new rinser insert that is compatible with long necks. If it works well then maybe even we might switch to long necks someday if heritage glass gets to be hard to find. But for now I like our ’shorty’ bottles, and as long as Anchor Steam, Boulevard, Summit, and others keep using them I think we will be too.