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On Wenesday we finally packaged the White Ale. Since this was a historic event here at the brewery for many reasons, I took a whole bunch of pictures.

overview of the line
filling the longneck bottles
slapping the johns label on the bottle
put the bottles in the boxes
closing the box tops

We used to have boxes like this at one time. We got rid of them because they are such a pain in the butt. You have to close the lid on each box, and that takes an extra person on the bottling line. I find personally that at home, the boxes are equally annoying when you are trying to pull a bottle out of the fridge. Well we only have a truckload of this stuff to go through, so hopefully by next year we can have nice new box-free packaging!

Overall the day went well. The bottles had a tendency to fall over on the line, requiring me to rush over and stand them up before they caused a log jam all the way back to the labeler. The labeler will then gleefully crush bottles, causing a big mess. We used to have this problem with shortnecks, but Chris solved it. He says he can solve this one too, and I have little doubt that he will.

Look for this beer in a store near you. Be wary though, John’s still has a few cases of the Stone City beer left, so check the label on the box to make sure that it is the beer that we made.

And remember, this weekend is Maifest, so come out here and buy some yourself!

Well we still have not bottled the White ale, and it is starting to become something of a comedy. Chris spent all yesterday trying to get the Crowner to adjust height, but it had seized up after not having been adjusted for several years. He almost gave up, and starting mumbling about how these labels would fit on our regular short bottles. Teresa and I told him that would NOT do! So he called someone to come out and look at it. They put a welding torch on it and heated the whole Crowner up. This allowed Chris to get it loosened, and now it seems to be working. I guess its like the emergency brake on a car, if you don’t use it everyone once in a while, it will lock up. In this case, its a huge screw that has several hundred pounds of cast iron sitting on it, so it really was a pain to get it moving again. Chris says now that he will adjust it periodically so this never happens again!

Bottling day is set for tommorrow, barring any other unseen events.

Next week we will be doing two days of back to back 24 hour brews to get the White Ale ready for the beer club shipment on May 28th. I’m looking forward to some late night brewing peace and quiet.

The week after that, on May 12th, our California V ale strain will arrive so we can make the first batch of Warsh Pale Ale. The label situation on that is not looking too great at the moment. It still in the design stage. Please email me and let me know what you guys think of this:

We hope that ATF will not have any funny questions for us this time!

One last thing. MAIFEST IS THIS WEEKEND. So get your butts out here and have some beer, brats, and polka. Its too early too look at the weather, but hopefully it will be a beautiful day!

Pubcrawler is a great website for finding a reviews of breweries that you would like to visit. I have to admit, I’m vain, and I do check it periodically to see how we are doing. Lately I have had to suffer with this idiot’s review being the last one listed:

If you want good beer go to Johns grocery in Iowa City.

Beer Quality Beer Selection Food Service Overall
So So So So N/A N/A Lousy
Don’t waste your time, stay on the interstate. I sampled all of the beers. They all tasted the same from the amber to the stout LOUSY
Gary T, Trimble, MO
(11/19/2003)

I have asked Pubcrawler twice to remove the post, but they are probably pretty much overloaded running such a huge site. I don’t mind him recommending John’s Grocery at all, I even joked about it with Doug. But I do mind that he leaves no reason as to what exactly is wrong with our beer. Maybe he doesn’t like lagers? Maybe he was having a bad hair day? Who knows. I guess some people are dissapointed that we are not a full service restaurant, but that is why this website is so great.. you can discover that before you come all the way out here.

So i’m asking you who read this site to please leave an honest review of what you think of Millstream, and maybe we can just bury this guys rude comment. Its out of place.

I see Tim Rask has already got the idea without me even saying anything! We need an army of beer drinkers like him!

White Ale Labels Have Arrived

They are here! We will be bottling it monday, and Doug from John’s Grocery says he will be here to receive the first 6 pack off the line! Here is picture of the new labels compared to the old labels:

Not a great picture But it shows the size difference. We had to re-size the labels to get them to work with our stubborn world tandem labelers. The good thing is that our labels cost about 1/5 of the old, self adhesive label. I’m not sure what Doug is going to do with the old labels from Stone City. Maybe use for a white beer art project?

New Van

I also need to mention that we have purchased a new van. The old was really starting to break down often, so we figured it would save alot of headaches to just get a new van. As you can see, it only has the most basic wording on it. We plan on getting it fully detailed later in the summer, when we have better cash flow. If you have any ideas or suggestions as to what we should put on it, let me know. We are thinking of doing a full color paint job. I would like to see “get behind Millsteam Brewing” on the back, but i’m not sure what else.

Well we pretty much struck out at the World Cup this year. There were more entries overall than in previous years. Here are the results for the categories that we entered in:

Belgian Style White (or Wit)/Belgian-Style Wheat, 17 Entries
Gold: Hoegaarden, Interbrew S.A., Brussels, Belgium
Silver: Allagash White, Allagash Brewing Co., Portland, ME
Bronze: Blanche de Chambly, Unibroue Inc., Chambly, Canada

Vienna-Style Lager, 28 Entries
Gold: Schaumburger Landbier, Schaumburger Brauerei, Stadthagen, Germany
Silver: Gordon Biersch Vienna Lager, Gordon Biersch Brewery Restaurant, Chattanooga, TN
Bronze: Sainsbury Taste The Difference Vienna Style, Meantime Brewing Co. Ltd., London, UK

Traditional German-Style Bock, 16 Entries
Silver: Brick Anniversary Bock, Brick Brewing Co. Ltd., Waterloo, Canada
Bronze: Bock Lager, Elk Grove Brewery & Restaurant, Elk Grove, CA

You can see they didn’t even award a Gold medal in the Bock category. These judges are not fooling around! Hoegaarden took the Gold in the Wit category, just like I predicted, and Allagash White is certainly a good beer. Good for Gordon Beirsch taking a silver in the Vienna lager category, though I have not ever had that beer from them. Otherwise i’m pretty unfamiliar with all the other winners… Oh well, There is always next time. That will be in two years when they have the contest again. Time for me to work on perfecting my brews I guess.

I have been seeing little blurbs around about how Cedar Brewing has won a bunch of gold medals at the World Beer Championships. I would like to refer people to my previous entry on this subject. In short, I don’t think these medals are worth much.

Today we made our 4th batch of white ale. I harvested the WLP400 belgian yeast from the 3rd batch. It was the first time I had ever harvested this yeast. They were quite frothy and active! This yeast is only semi-flocculant, but it is better than Hefeweizen yeast, which is absolutely non-floculant (harvesting that yeast was like basically scooping up beer). WLP400 seems to clump up a bit and float on foam. So I tried to get as much foam as possible. This is the difference between top fermenting and bottom fermenting yeast. Our lager strain does not float to the top when its done. But this ale strain seems to catch on the bubbles and go for a ride. I seem to get plenty of yeast, but we will see if this yeast will change in character over many repitchings. We only used our Hefe yeast twice in order to prevent this from happening. But I need to get alot of yeast ready because in two weeks we are going to make two quadruple batches in prepration for Beers Across America, who want a truckload of the White Ale for their beer of the month club for June.

Our White Ale labels are supposed to arrive on friday, so the White ale will be bottled for the first time next Monday, the 26th of April. I am praying that Chris is as handy as he thinks he is and can get our bottling line to handle long necks without too many headaches. It will be a first for this brewery!

I feel the need to drop a note about the Great Taste of the Midwest Bus Trip that we are trying to setup. This is one of the largest festivals in the country and has 400+ beers for you to sample. If you are interested in taking a bus to the Great Taste beer fest on Aug 14th, please contact teresa@millstreambrewing.com
The cost of the trip is going to be 50$ a person and includes free beer on the bus. The bus will leave at 8am and arrive at noon in Madison, WI. It will then leave at 6pm and get everyone back safe and sound at 10pm. We need to get 45 people signed up by April 23rd or we will have to cancel purchase of the festival tickets. The tickets usually sell out in the first week of May so there is no time to lose! We currently only have 14 people signed up, so get the word out!!

That said today was a ho-hum day of bottling. The labeler broke down and Chris was cussing while he was trying to fix it. Apparently a bolt snapped on the damn thing. After about half an hour he had it back up and running though.
While I was bottling I could not take my mind off the fact that my beers were being judged at the World Beer Cup today. I hope I do well! They are not going to release the results until Saturday, so I will have to wait until then… If you are looking for results they will be posted here.