Happy New Years
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.