millstreambrewing.com

This will be a short week as we all take some well deserved time off for thanksgiving. Today we bottled some wheat, stout and rootbeer. Things went pretty smoothly… It was kinda of nice for a change!

The health inspector came by today. He is a pretty nice guy, and I think he likes coming to inspect us, because everything is so clean and safe. It is a nice break from having messy kitchens and ‘cold rooms’ that are above 50 degrees. We put so much into making our sure our beer has a good shelf life that most of his concerns seem rather trivial. Like having handing washing stations in an area where everyone wears gloves so the sanitizer doesn’t eat the skin off their hands. The only ones that really apply are the Good Manufacturing Process ones, like making sure bizzare foreign objects aren’t falling into the beer. I think we have that part covered pretty good too.

We were abit worried about what he would think of us having a cat, but it turned out he loves cats, and he thought it was fine as long as she was confined to the upstairs. Thankfully Chris put a screen door at the bottom of the stairs just last week, so we can finally let Millie out to hunt for mice. There should be plenty for her, as I found two dead mice when I was clearing out the traps last week!

I see that Ragbrai Registration starts this week. I think next year I want to do the whole thing.. who is going with me?

Today we did a short batch of the Colony Oatmeal Stout. Last week, when Chris was mashing in, he realized that we were short on the black malt for the Stout. So we had to UPS a bag of black malt here, and today we made a short batch of SUPER black malt stout to blend into the other batch. I’m still not sure how we were short on the black malt, it must have been an inventory mistake on my part. Since we normally do short batches of Stout anyway, because it is such a big beer, there was plenty of room in the fermenter for another half batch. Infact, the tank is now as full as a normal batch of beer!

You have to be flexible and creative to solve your problems in this business! I’m completely confident that this will work out fine. Without enough black malt, the roasted barley comes through the beer to strong. Roasted barley has a round, burnt-smokey flavor. Black malt is the essential Stout grain, it has a more blackened caramel/coffee flavor.

The Stout and Bock are selling really well. Infact they will be putting the Schokolade Bock on tap at the Old Chicago in Bettendorf this weekend! A treat if you live in the Quad cities!

However our overall barrelage is a bit behind last year. I think this is due to the fact that last year we did two Beer Clubs, and this year we only did one. Its really not something we can control, i’m amazed that the Beer Clubs pick us so often as it is. Still, I would really like to show that we ‘made more beer’ this year than last year. Our overall sales and profits are up though, so I guess that is what really counts, eh?

The soda is doing really great. So far it is just a tad ahead of the beer in overall gallons sold this year. Just as I had predicted! My opinion on Soda has changed though, i’m now much more positive about this place becoming a soda factory. I think this is because of how excited I have become over the possibility of doing new flavors.

I’m still working on our new Black Cherry and Diet Root Beer flavors. I’m still not sure what sweetner to go with, though my mind is slowly closing on Splenda. Its exhorbinately more expensive than regular Nutrasweet. But to non-diet drinkers, it seems to be preferred. The weird thing in my tests is that people who frequently drink Diet Soda seem to prefer my Nutrasweet Diet Root Beer over Splenda. I think this is becuase they are used to the bitter aftertaste of Nutrasweet (aspartame) and unconsciously prefer it.

Well I have not updated this page in awhile. The reason is because I have been so hard at work at my NEW webpage. I have been working with Mike England to start a non-profit organization to change Iowa’s beer laws. The best way to get the word out about anything nowaday’s is through the internet. So I have been working hard at designing Lift The Limit.org. Let me know what you think.

Well Chris and I had great time at the 2nd annual Thirsty Classic held at our brewery last Saturday. We had 60 some entries, and there were some really good beers in there. The best of show Wee-heavy was a no brainer perfect beer!

See the results here. I took some pictures I will post them later.

There was some discussion of doing an Iowa Homebrewer of the Year Award to encourage people to enter all four of Iowa’s competitions. This one, Mugz (quad cities) competition, the IBU (des moines)competition, and the State Fair competition.

I was hoping to make it to the Mugz Competition on November 20th, but i’m sorry to say I will not be able to make it. I think those guys can manage by themselves, I was very impressed again by the quality of our judges!

The Brewery has always attracted cats. Its something we encourage, to keep the mice down. This year, we have had a bumper crop. First we had a litter underneath our kegs on the ramp going down into the cellar. They seemed to grow up fine this summer. About six weeks ago we had a second litter, on the side of the brewery were we store our extra pallets.

Everything seemed fine, but it was getting cold out. Next thing we noticed was that there was only two of the four kitties left. Yesterday, Deb noticed the black one of these two kitties literally sitting on the table next to the salesroom, shivering. The poor cat was sick with a cold. It was so cute, even when it sneezed on all of us!

So we have spent the last two days nursing it back to health. It is living in a box upstairs in the office. I’m not sure if we’ll keep it, but it would be nice to have a cat around the brewery, a real mouse catcher!

Here are some pictures:

whats my name?

meow!

Some say we should call it “mille” as in Millstream. Other say, Stout or Porter. I kind of like mille.

Today, I am filtering the first batch of Schokolade Bock. We will be bottling it on Wenesday. I think of all of our beers, this one is the one that is the most asked about. This is because one year we rushed it out during Oktoberfest (because we ran out of Oktoberfest beer!) and people have been looking for it in October ever since. But we really don’t have the capacity to do two seasonals at the same time like that. We just sold out of Oktoberfest at the brewery this weekend, so November is perfect timing for us to release the Bock.

This years Bock is very malty and nutty, and has its typical tawny brown hue. It has been aged for five weeks, which I now consider to be the minumum for this beer. Lagering the beer really mellows it out, and that is essential in a good bock beer.

The second batch has been in the lager tank for three weeks already, and we will be making the third batch next week. We should have the bock around until February.

I have had some very good Pumpkin beers lately. It really a interesting and very american style of beer. They do not always contain pumpkin, but they are generally ales that have pumpkin pie spices in them. I had one nice example at Ram Brewing in Schamburg, IL a few weeks ago. They sprinkled fresh ground nutmeg on the top of each glass. I know that sounds over-powering, but it was actually quite tasty! I also had Raccoon River’s Pumpkin ale last weekend, that was a very tasty brew. Dave over there says that he put seventy pounds of canned pumpkin into the mash! I have always been of the opinion that no pumpkin is neccessary in a pumpkin beer, because pumpkins actually do not taste like anything, that is why pumpkin pie is spiced! But I have to say, adding real pumpkin does add some body to the beer, which I found very interesting.

Finally I had a good batch from one of my homebrewing friends. His was a bit more mellow on the spices, but that was good, because you could definately drink more than just one. He said one year he used real roasted pumpkin, and it gave the beer an orange head!

I have never been impressed by any pumpkin beer I have ever had in a bottle, this is a thing that should be done fresh, and served with an appropriate meal, and a brewpub is perfect for that. So this is one style that we really cannot make here at Millstream. We have plenty of brands to manage as it is!