millstreambrewing.com

My first brew log, cool. Up until last week that’s what I thought blog stood for, until my wife corrected me. But Aaron has drug me out from the bowels of our ‘57 bottle filler to occasionally comment on life at Millstream. (I always wanted a ‘57, but I think I had something more… drivable in mind!)

As Aaron said, we are getting odds and ends done this week. For me, this means fixing, repairing, cleaning, dusting off, etc… Yesterday I took apart the heat exchanger for cooling the wort and cleaned it. Today we have a truck load of bottles coming (we hope), the beer garden needs to be cleared out to make room for the large Oktoberfest tent coming Thursday, and the filler needs work for tomorrow’s bottling.

In other news, we are bidding a fond farewell to our cream soda as sales haven’t really supported it. As Millstream’s CEO I would like to apologize to those loyal cream soda drinkers, but we will do some taste testing during Oktoberfest to choose a new soda flavor. There will be a couple of different flavors available to the public for tasting and your input will determine the next Millstream flavor. We are also open to any other ideas so feel free to make requests.

Well, I think I hear something falling apart so I better go see what’s up. This cyber space thing is pretty neat, now if I could just figure out how to download a good beer and output it to my glass it would be perfect!

I just wanted to put a reminder here that the THIRSTY Classic homebrew competition is coming up on November 6th. If you haven’t brewed your entry yet, you should get on it! Here is the linky for more information.

The Competition will be held inside the brewery. Last year it was a great time, and the quality of the entries and the judges was truly top-notch. I am really looking forward to it this year.

THIRSTY also has a new forum for discussing … beer, of course! If you live in or near Iowa City, and love beer and brewing, then you should get involved!

That is what we are doing all week. No brewing, just setting up the tents, bottling and kegging extra beer, to get ready for our big annual event. I hope you can all make it out.

This year we going to have the Dave Franklin Band doing classic polka on Friday night. Then we will get things going early on Saturday, with the Parade at 10am. Then we will have Russ Dietz and the Stray Cats play Oompha Polka all day long. I’ll be serving beer in the morning, and then Chris and I will head off to do some judging at the Oktoberfest Homebrew Contest. Last year that got me pretty blitzed, so i’m not scheduled to work at all after that! We are going to have some extra judges from THIRSTY help out, so hopefully I will more coherent afterwards this time.

Then on sunday we will have Kurt Boche serenade the crowd. If you haven’t seen this guy, you really are missing out. He is true old world talent!

In other news, I received an email from a fan this morning, pointing out how GREAT the John’s Generations White Ale is ranked on ratebeer.com! Number 1 among Belgian Style Wits! I think we finally have a winner with the beer community!

This really has my hopes up for how our beer is going to do this week at the GABF. This year I submitted the John’s Generations under Category 52, Belgian-Style Witbier, the Schild Brau Amber under Category 24, Vienna-Style Lager , and the Oktoberfest under Category 25, German-Style Marzen/Oktoberfest. They are judging this Wenesday through Friday, and announcing the awards at 1:30pm on Saturday.

One last note, we are getting the first batch of Colony Oatmeal Stout ready this week. It should be available in bottles just after we run out of either oktoberfest or Pilsner.

For all of you who were upset by that article in the Daily Iowan, someone just pointed out to me this wonderful Guest Opinion slamming her shoddy reporting.

In other News, Chris has agreed to join me in posting on this page. Hopefully he will find time to post something soon!

The 9th annual Brewfest had perfect weather last saturday. I heard that we had the largest turn out yet, despite having so many competing events. It was fun to hang out with all the local homebrewers and beer aficionado’s (snobs?) of Iowa City, and try all the different beers.

There were some great beers, and some not so great beers. My two personal favorites (beside our beers of course!) were the Rogue Smoke beer, which was a wonderful smoked ale, that was more delicate than your typical bamberg Rauchbier bottle, and the Spaten Optimator double bock on draft. The Optimator was very deceptively smooth for being 9% ABV! One of the not so great was Capitol Oktoberfest, which had a funky stale bubblegum flavor… It must have been an old bottle, because I just had some great Capitol Oktoberfest last month at the brewery itself.

I was sadden to see that their were only two breweries from Iowa there. Millstream (of course!) and my friend Dave Coy from Raccoon River (who brought his Oktoberfest and Bandit IPA) who came all the way from Des Moines. Cedar Brewing did not show, but I heard they are still in transition from the last owners to the new owners. We seemed a little lonesome, even though we had a prime spot in the center of the tent. Its amazing that so many people just don’t know who we are … Or maybe they are more excited by some beer from Belgium or Scotland.. thinking that intuitively it must be better beer than anything made in poor Iowa? I don’t know, but its something I hope we can change!

I was shocked to see that Granite City in Cedar Rapids didn’t even attend the event. I guess thats what happens when you run a brewery without any brewers?

I did have an enjoyable conversation with one of the owners of City Brewing in LaCrosse Wisconsin. He told me a great story about the difficulties that they have had to go through to get their beer into the annual Oktoberfest event in their home town. This year will be the first year they will be allowed at the event, that Bud and Miller have tried to lock them out of. It was very inspiring and something I can definately relate to from my experiences around here. I told him how we just kicked Budweiser out of Oktoberfest in Amana!

At one point I talked to some crazy reporter the Daily Iowan. She wrote about two pages of scribbled notes of what I said. Her article, however, contains none of that! I hope this article is a joke. She did quote my assistant, Aaron Gerbo, after he politely asked her not to publish anything he said to her. Some quality journalism at the UI!

I took some pictures, but it was so dark in the tent and so bright outside that they really did not come out. If I can clean them up I will post them later.