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This weekend is Prelude to Christmas in Amana. Its a good time to bring your significant other with you and do some Holiday shopping. There will be lots of neat demonstrations going on, and all the stores will be open late. Don’t forget to visit the Tannenbaum forest, and see all the different christmas trees that have been put up. Tom and Teresa put ours up, and even found some beer lights to wrap around it! If you get winded, come over to the brewery and have a beer!

With the giving season in mind, we have two special things that might make good gifts. First is our brand new spankin Sampler 12 pack, designed in house by Teresa:

We hope the cut-outs on the side will end once and for all the confusion about what beer is inside our sampler packs! We tried just putting ‘brewers choice’ for the seasonal selection last time, but we found the people really wanted to know exactly what was in them.

Also we have our Christmas gift boxes, complete with two big bottles of beer and some glassware to enjoy it with:

Remember our liter bottles are hand bottled. Today Tom did a whole table full of liters to get ready for the weekend… it is a very laborious job!

And don’t forget our 20th anniversary Dopplebock. We still have some left! Today Buckley and I opened a bottle out of the cooler, and wow, we were impressed at how well it is coming along. I would say the beer is near its peak…so if you already have a bottle, the holidays would be the perfect time to drink it. Our bottle was full of complex malt flavor, and with a nice sweetness to it. It also has quite a zing.. just drinking a half glass was enough to make me feel the alcohol… it truly is a winter warmer!

What post would be complete without a cute kitten picture. Here is Pumpkin, taking a nap on a lap, something she is very good at.

One more thing, I’ve updated the Lift the Limit page, so you may want to check that out (its been a while!).

The Barrel Aged Beer festival was a great time! It was held at the Wrigleyville Goose Island pub, on Chicago’s northside. We (being Paul and Adam from Old Capitol and I) got there early, and had a couple of pints of Goose Island’s Kolsch to warm things up. Their Kolsch is a great beer, reminiscent of our wheat beer, but drier and with a stylistic sulfur note. Great stuff.

The festival started at noon, and there was a long line to get in. When we finally got inside, we were bewildered by the more than 60+ barrel aged beers to try. There were so many good beers, and they were all very strong, so it was pretty much impossible to try them all! I found myself standing in the crowd and reading the program menu.. most of the beers had names that were a full sentence long! Some of my favorites were Old No. 23 aged in a Port barrel from Bristol Brewing, and Angry Mike’s Stoudt Kriek from Flossmoor Station. These were both very different than the ‘average’ Imperial Stout or Barleywine in a Jack Daniels Barrel.

Even more different was a section of “wild” beers. These are beers that are fermented or aged with Brettyomyces and other wild yeasts, resulting in a funky acidic profile ( like a Lambic). I especially enjoyed these sort of beers.. the real stand outs were the Le Woody by Pizza Port Brewing, and New Belgium’s Le Terroir. I’d love to do a serious belgian lambic.. but would anyone in Iowa drink it? …maybe we’ll have to find out someday!

We finished off the night with dinner at Lashet’s Inn. I cannot recommend this place enough, the German food was excellent! The lady who owns the place was even hovering about, making sure that nothing was left undone at our table…. Some really great service!

All and all a great time I look forward to attending next year, hopefully with some barrels of our own! But for right now if you want some barrel aged beer, be sure to try the Bourbon Brown down at Old Capitol in Iowa City.

Today we are brewing Schild Brau. Yesterday we made Colony Oatmeal Stout.. and it is foaming over in the fermentation room.. something that we take as a good sign!

Last weekend we had the THIRSTY Classic Homebrew competittion in our new warehouse. You can see the results here. In first place was Joe Hetrick, one of Thirsty’s loyal members. Good job Joe! He made a very excellent American Style Pale Ale. I had the joy of judging both the Wheat beer category, and the Hybrid Ale category. There were some very fine beers, and we truly took our time in judging them. Unfortunately I forgot my camera, so I don’t have any pictures to show you ;(

Tommorrow Paul from the Old Capitol Brewpub and I are going to the Barrel Aged Beer Festival in Chicago. Hopefully we will learn a thing or two, and maybe have our own Barrel Aged Beers in the Future. I’m not very interested in making a bourbon style beer, seeing as I don’t really like bourbon, but cellaring one of our own beers in a wine or port barrel would be something I would like to investigate. I’ll report more when I get back from the trip.

Pumpkin our new kitten is doing great. She is a surpringly vocal little kitty, and a real attention hog… but we love her all the same! Teresa even made her a cat bed, using an old blanket that has black cats and jack o lanterns on it.. pretty cool!

Not not pumpkin beer, but pumpkin our new brewery cat. She is an adorable little thing, very curious. The breeder named her pumpkin, and we all think its a pretty good name, so we are planning on keeping it.

We’ll have her out on display at the THIRSTY homebrew contest this Saturday. We have recieved over 70 entries so far, some from as far away as New York! Its still not too late to get your entries in…

Today we bottled and kegged the Schokolade Bock. It has been downstairs lagering for five weeks. We know there has been an unusual gap inbetween our seasonals, but we did not expect to go through so much Oktoberfest so soon! All good things must wait, and so we resisted releasing the Bock early to cover the seasonal ‘outage’.

This year the bock is malty and has its classic chocolate malt undertones, just like it should be! Its nice to have it back.. it must mean that fall is here!

Today our best of show homebrewer Mark Rippe stopped by. Unfortunately we were in the middle of a very large bottling day, and we were unable to give him a tour. But we did talk about having him come and ‘help’ us brew sometime… and maybe even help us make another belgian beer sometime. It would be nice to replicate his great Belgian Trippel that got top place at the Oktoberfest beer contest, but he said it was between 9-10% alcohol, which would be a problem in this state. I think a lighter version would just not be the same… too bad!

Meanwhile we have been finishing up our new warehouse. Chris has put the ceiling in on the new lab, and teresa has finished dry walling the connection area between the two buildings. I have been promising to paint the new employee bathroom green and orange! No one else seems to thrilled though.. strange.

As we grow, we would like to have someone distribute our beer for us, but there still is no ’small’ distributors around that can give our short shelf life products the attention they deserve. I think this is one of the reason you see so few small breweries being distributed in Iowa. Don’t ya think its kind of strange how many interesting Wisconsin beers you can find in IL but not in Iowa? We just finished a trial with a new distributor in Des Moines, but it really didn’t seem to work. So we are back doing it ourselves again. Sorry if there were any hiccups in the supply line. No worries though, Dan, our salesman, is back in the van taking product to Des Moines, and everything should be back to normal soon.

Well that is all for now. Things are slowing down and there is not that much to report. The next big event is the THIRSTY CLASSIC competition on November 5th. I think we will be getting our new kitten, Pumpkin then too. That would be good, because the mice have really started to come into the brewery, and I have become a full time trapmaster…. instead of Brewmaster!