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Well I recieved a reply from Scott Ingersoll of the USBTC, and sure enough, the results are in this months issue of All About Beer (which has been sitting on my desk for a few days). It seems our Schild Brau got beat by Capital Brewery’s Winter Skal. I bought a six pack of that this winter, and I must say it was pretty good. The overall winner (in the Vienna/Marzen category) was Snake River’s Alpinefest. That Snake River won does not surprise me, but that this beer won is a little surprising, since the usually do well in this category with their Vienna lager. Maybe my beer was a bit light for the category. Oh well, the guys at the USBTC do a good job, and it does not cost anything to enter. Scott said they had some tough personal problems to deal with, and thats why the delay in getting the results out. I’m just glad that they do such a good job with the competition. I assume they will have their webpage updated soon with the full results.

It was a nice day today, and the brewery was very busy. We have dozens of kegs of rootbeer going out for highschool graduations parties. Hopefully the weather will hold out and we will have a great Memorial Day weekend out here at the brewery.

That time of year is approaching! Yesterday I sent off a bunch of beer to the North American Beer Awards in Idaho. I sent six brands all together, not all of them are medal worthy batches, but at 15 bucks for an entry, it is worth it to get back the judges comments. Its alot cheaper than say, sending my beer to Siebel to be tested for ’style analysis’ and to be told that ‘yes its appropriate for the style’. That cost me 150 bucks, and I did not get the detailed criticism that I get from the NABA.

I recieved the comments from the World Beer Cup this week. Overall, the comments where very good. Both the Schild Brau and Schokolade Bock made it to the second round. However, all three judges decided the bock belonged in the Schwarz Beer Category. I had considered sending it into that category, but some consultations with some local homebrewers convinced me that it was better off as a bock. *sigh* Its hard to conform! The comments were so good though that I wish this beer was around all year so I could enter it into more contests!

The Schild Brau recieved good comments, but judges felt it was too bitter, had too much caramel flavor, and was too dark. Well I don’t feel bad about those complaints! These complaints have been consistent enough from contest to contest that I am seriously considering producing a toned down version for the GABF next year. Especially since they are no longer allowing people to enter the same beer into mutiple categories (my strategy last year). I think this is due to Pete’s Wicked winning medals in the Scotch and Brown Ale categories. I bet the judges felt tricked by that!!

Also on this subject, I entered my Schild Brau into the United States Beer Tasting Championships in March, but never heard a thing from them. There website still has not been updated, and my email has not been replied too. Anyone know what is up?

September 18th will be a Big Day. The Davenport Brew-ha-ha Festival , the Iowa City Brew Festival, and the Mount Horeb Grumpy Troll Festival are all on this day. Can we say POOR PLANNING? Although the Mount Horeb fest looks like fun, and the Mayor of the town personally called me and invited me, i’m not sure how I can be at three places at once. Worse still, we only have two tapboxes to serve from. If anyone reading this knows someone would like to be our stand in at the Mount Horeb fest, please email the brewery.

In concert with John’s Grocery, I’m proud to say that our beer will be featured at the Iowa City Shakespeare Festival. If you don’t have tickets, get them now! Its a great time, drinking good beer outside in a real shakespeare style ampitheatre.

Today was a good day. We put the Warsh Pale Ale on tap for the first time this year. It is quite tasty, though not as quite as bitter as I would like it. I guess we need to increase the hops so more.. though there are already a whole lot of hops in it!

It does have that wonderful citrus flavor from the dry hopping from the Cascade hops, and a nice malt flavor (thanks to Briess Pale Ale Malt!) Still no word on when 12oz labels will be done. But it will be available here in liters (and at John’s Grocery and several other locations) by this weekend. I’ll try to get a list of places from Dan. Oh, and you can get here in Growlers!

We bottled 900 cases of John’s Grocery White Ale for the Beers Across America beer of the month club. It was some back breaking work.. i’m pretty beat. Overall it went very smoothly, even with the long necks. They still tend to fall over more than short necks, but it is a minor inconvience for us. There was a scary moment when Chris realized that he had left the bleed valve open on the filler while he was fixing something. Since he pipes the bleed valve downstairs, no-one was aware that beer was pushing past the posi-pump and being lost! It made mess downstairs, and for a moment we though we had lost something like ten barrels and would not be able to finish the run! But we determined that we actually only lost four barrels (120 gallons) which is not terribly bad out of 80 bbls. We still had enough beer to finish the job. That is good, because if we are one bottle short, the club can refuse the entire order! I told Chris that this was good reason to buy a three way valve, so he can’t leave the bleed valve open.

Chris shortened up the line last week, which has given us some extra room. There was a long section of conveyer where the ‘foiler’ was, from back when the brewery used to foil the top of each bottle. This has given us an extra ten feet of space. Its great! We need all the space we can get around here!

Today was a nice stormy day brewing the fifth batch of the Johns Grocery Belgian White ale. We had some serious storms going just north of us. All we got was a cool breeze, which I was very thankful for, as it was pretty damn hot in the brewery, even though the thermometer only read 97 degrees!

This beer seems to be different everytime we make it. We will see how this batch comes out. We are using fresh WLP 400 yeast from White labs. The yeast got a little stressed out after batch number three, and the subsequent batches were very different. Batch number four had some clove like flavors going on, and batch numbers 5 and 6 have some serious belgian-esters going on (the batches we did for the beer club.)

Batch number three has become over carbonated in the bottles. This is because the beer did not quite finish all the way (and is the reason the yeast got so unhappy later on…) The funny thing is this is sort of traditional, as wheat beers in Europe are often very highly carbonated. To pour these beers, there are two methods, the ‘dirty’ pour, and the slow pour. The slow pour is to slowly pour the beer down the side of the glass, while tilting the glass to allow the beer to be minimally disturbed. The “dirty” bartender pour is the put the glass over the bottle, and then quickly invert them both. You then pull up the the bottle, always keeping the bottle opening just below the head on the beer. I demonstrated the latter pour today to Chris, and he was pretty impressed.

I was also concerned about the amount of sulfur in this batch of beer, but it is gone now. One of the benefits of having live yeast in the bottle is that the beer often changes after you bottle it. I guess the yeast reabsorbed the sulfur. I am quite relieved, as I have never detected H2S in my beer before. Oh what strange yeast strain this is!

Well I was surprised to learn today that Fitzpatricks of Iowa City is closing! It was in the Press Citizen this morning. Here is all of the relevant part of the article:

Walding said Fitzpatrick’s also is facing a suspension due to alcohol violations, but has indicated its intent to close permanently.

Owner Gary Fitzpatrick decline to comment for the story

I can only wonder what will happen now. I am usually quite reserved about what I say about other breweries in Iowa, but I think I can safely say that everyone I know thinks this is a GOOD thing. The beer at Fitzpatricks was inconsistent, and even if it was OK, it did not live up to the potential of the 500,000 dollar brewhouse that was in place. Last year he hired a new brewmaster, but I have not noticed a real difference in the beer.

I hope they sell the place to someone who really knows what good beer is. I feel the place has potential. The food was pretty bad too, I remember ordering a salad, and getting a bowl of steak and cheese with a little bit of lettuce at the bottom. There seemed to be no effort made to pair the food and beer together.
The place is an awesome location though, and it should be able to do very well in the right hands.

The reason that the are closing is that they have been fined more than once for underage drinking. This is something that they have known for in the past. Also, I hear that the owner, Gary, received a DWI in the last few months. He may also still be in debt, I know that he had alot of trouble reopening after having spent so much money on the renovation (the new brewhouse plus some very nice black walnut paneling) of the expansion.

The downside is that we are minus one more brewery in Iowa. The Granite City breweries don’t count, because they are ‘zombie’ breweries that have no brewmasters. What Iowa needs is more brewery interaction, where we can hold festivals, etc together. This year I guess that the Iowa City beer festival will have only two local breweries, us and Cedar Brewing in Cedar Rapids. Perhaps Dave Coy from Raccoon River in Des Moines will show up, and Dan from Blue Cat in Moline…. That will make a total of four local breweries!

Of course, I would rather have less breweries, than have local breweries pouring sour beer at the fest.

In other news, I hear that it is unlikely that the Des Moines Brewfest will happen this year, since the City is refusing to allow them any space to actually hold the festival. Every year the City has moved the festival, because it is ‘too noisy’. God forbid we disturb anyones sleep in downtown Des Moines at 10pm on Saturday night! They say they want to revive downtown Des Moines, but they apparently don’t want to support any form of drinking…

Well, does anyone want to open a brewpub in Iowa City? I would love to, but I have my hands full here in Amana

Update: Tonight I saw Gary on the evening news. He said that he already has someone in mind to sell the business too. So way may only see a change of hands for the business…