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I went a new bar in Iowa City, Siren. It is in the downtown pedmall, next to the new library. You’ll remember that this is where Burger King used to be, if your a long time Iowa City resident.

Inside it is a very cool place, with faux 30’s area feel. A pianist was playing while I was there (there was a 5$ cover to help pay for him.) He played for quite a long time and it really added to the overall feel of the place, along with the lighting and baroque metal railing on the stairs. The upstairs is very elegant and has a good size stage.

It is primarily a wine bar. I was there with my friend Larry, who is a wine distributor. We surveyed the wine list and found some nice reds, definately better than what you will find in a typical restaurant. The beer list though, was a catastrophe. I dare say the Chile’s at the mall has a better selection. There was only a few domestic micro’s and the ones they had were beers such as Boulevard Wheat and Redhook ESB. Probably two of the blandest Micro’s I can think of. The only exotic thing was Kirin on tap.. the budweiser of Japan. Its sort of shocking, that with 8 taps, and an exotic wine list, that this was all there was.

I got to meet the owner, Jackie, who was incredibly nice and a very generous. She was very receptive to the possiblity of carrying our products. She explained that during the rush to open, the beers were pretty much left up to the distributors choice. I tried to recommend getting some exotic belgians on her bottle beer list, but she was completely focused on wine (and I don’t want to be pushy!). *Sigh* We have a long way to go to make people understand that beer can be just as refined as wine.

I do recommend the place. It has a nice menu, lots of appetizers and fondue (though no main courses). Please go there and tell them that you would like too see some Millstream on the ‘beer list’, and maybe ask for a bottle of Duvel rather than Chardonnay.

Today everything is different. After going around to every retail account, I can’t find this beer June 11th beer anywhere. What I did find was some March beer at one of the stores that we got a complaint from. It was probably the culprit, we’ve had problems with March beer before, but I though it was all long gone by now. All the beer we brought back at the brewery is ok, and after re-checking my shelf life samples, they are ok too!

I feel stupid! I think my tastes buds were off yesterday, and I was suspicious of that bad filtration and putting out slightly cloudy beer in the first place. However, Chris and I have now come to the conclusion that I was wrong, and it was old beer on the shelf that was the culprit!

And oh, there was some old beer on the shelf’s in Iowa City! Hivee First Avenue, where our beer is on the warm shelf in the middle store, had January beer. That is six months old! Please help me convince these people that we deserve a cold slot, or maybe a top slot on the warm shelf.
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Just when everything seemed to be going well, today turned that all upside down. We recieved two customer complaints from Iowa City this week about our Schild Brau. I did some investigating, and found that the Schild Brau that we bottled on June 11th was the culprit.

If you have been following along here, that was the batch that I had so much trouble filtering, because my dosing pump was worn out. Well this batch is turning bad fast! It somehow escaped my QC radar. I did HLP tests the week before I filtered, and I did not see any bacteria growing in those tests. After bottling, I keep a few bottles up next to the hot water tanks to do ‘accelerated shelf life tests’. Once a week or so, I turn the bottles upside down, and see if they are cloudy. If they are cloudy thats a bad sign, unless of course the beer is unfiltered. For the beers that are unfiltered, I need to taste them. I have become surprisingly good at tasting hot beer, since it is time consuming to cool them down first. Cooling them only numbs your taste buds anyway. But it is more difficult with unfiltered beers for sure, since every time I taste one I have to toss the sample, and I can’t check all the samples at once. Often times, only one or two bottles out of four will go bad. In that case it is often difficult to detect. We have had so few problems lately, that I admit I have been lax in checking these samples.

This morning I was kicking myself! I can only assume that my difficult filtration introduced a bug, but there is no way to be sure. We do not have CSI crime scene team on hand to investigate and find the culprit. The frustrating thing about making beer in a brewery like this is that you probably never know for sure what the problem is. All you can do is change a few things, and hope that one of those things was the problem.

As for the Schild Brau, we only bottled two pallets of it (120 cases) and half of that is still here at the brewery….
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If you still don’t have tickets, there are some left! We will be serving our Schild Brau, Warsh Pale Ale, John’s White Ale, and Root Beer on draft each night. On Saturday there will be a special tasting starting at 3pm. I should be there… though I am doing a 30 mile bike ride from Iowa City to Amana through Oxford with my father that morning… so hopefully I will still be able to walk! But I need to get in shape for the brewery ride on July 17th!

There is a wonderful article on beer and food pairing in the New York times today (free subscription required). That guy is really been good at getting the word out about beer and food. I’m very impressed!

Well we received a truckload of malt today, so I need to go and haul up the last four pallets. Lets see, thats about 8000lbs! We have lots of free exercise around here!

This weekend my girlfriend and I went to Des Moines and stopped by Simo’s Cafistro in West Des Moines for dinner. Simo’s is a small and quaint little restaruant that specializes in Cajun style cuisine. The chef Randy is a big fan of our beer. He told me that he uses our Schild Brau in several of his dishes, including Jambalaya and his Stuffed Pork Loin. I had the jamabalaya, and let me tell you, it was simply delicious! I have been to New Orleans, and has some fine creole food down there, and this was on par, if not better than anything I had down there. My girlfriend had the Stuffed Porkloin, which was equally impressive. Both dishes were full of deep spicy flavors, that literally meld in your mouth. They went very well with my bottle of Schild Brau, which I noticed was of a recent bottling. A sign of how much of our beer they are going through!

My dish was ‘medium’ hot. Randy told me you can request a dish be any level of spicyness. I thing it was just about perfect, but some of you might want to tell them to turn it up a few notches.

So if you looking for something a little different in Iowa, don’t miss this restuarant:

Randy out infront of the cafe:

227 5th St West Des Moines , IA 50265
Phone: (515) 274-2463
They open for dinner at 5:30