Warsh Pale Released/Beer Club Bottled
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!