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We spent all of last week making 12 batches of Colony Oatmeal Stout for the Great American Beer Club. The stout ran off really well, but its still a huge amount of grain, and fact that it was running off so quickly somehow made it even more exhausting. I was literally running around all night, moving hundreds of pounds of steaming hot grains as fast as I could. The toughest part was pushing the grain cart outside in the icy weather. I really felt like one of those cave trolls in the Lord of the rings, pushing with all my might to move the overloaded cart just a few more inches… URGGGRR!

We have made over 150 bbls of Stout and now its time to start the Warsh Pail Ale. We did the first brew on saturday to get our ale yeast strain a good head start. We are then going to split that batch up into three different tanks, and the continously brew into them. By going into each tank sequentially, sort of a round-robin affair, we will give the yeast about 8 hours or so divide and grow before the next batch of warm, oxygenated wort is pumped into the tank. We have done this before and it works great giving us a vigourous fermentation. I have to say, we really seem to be getting good this Ale fermentation thing, considering our fermentation room is still averaging 55 degrees. We have a few tricks now, and our Ales are fermenting at an average of 70 degrees. I think this shows we can do anything here if we put our minds to it.

The malt bill on the Warsh Pail Ale is also huge, and the amount of hops is simply staggering. Its even more so now, because our cascade hops are rather low in alpha acids this year, only 4% compared to 5.75% last year. To make sure the beer is properly bitter, I have had to increase the amount of Northern Brewers in the beer. I like to adjust this hop, because it is a high alpha hop. This year our NB’s are 7.5%. If I adjusted the Cascade… It would take many more hops, plus I mostly am using the Cascade in for flavoring and the bitterness contribution is not really essential. This beer has over 13lbs of hops in each batch. Compare that to about 3lbs in our Schild Brau Amber. One side effect of a beer with so many hops is that you lose wort due to the hops sucking it up, and our yield per batch is going to be much lower. A small price to pay for such a yummy hoppy beer.

You can feel safe, because late at night, when your asleep i’m here brewing! The next two days, and most of next week, we are going to be doing 24hr brews to get this beer done for the beer club. That means I brew 12hrs at night, and Chris gets 12hrs during the day. I’m a night owl, so I actually really enjoy it. Now that we have Millie to keep me company, its not lonely at all!

Thankfully everything is going pretty well. The Oatmeal Stout is running off pretty fast. Recently Chris and I devised a way to get the rice hulls in a bed below the rest of the mash in the lauter tun. This is giving us record runoff times, in order of 2 and half hours, where before the stout has been more like 4 hours to runoff into the kettle. I’ve also been using the new automatic temperature controller that we have on the mash tun to get up to conversion temperature faster too. Now when I’m done mashing in, the mash is usually right at the temperature I want as soon as I’m done with the mill and get downstairs. It used to take another ten to fifteen minutes to adjust the temperature. Those minutes really add up when you are trying to do four brews a day!

In my spare time, I have been updating the webpage. I have been trying add more content to the about our beers page. Each beer now has a basic recipe, including the ABV (alcohol content). This is a good thing for me to put on the page, because I really don’t pay much attention to it. Most of the time when i’m asked, I really have no idea what alcohol percentage a particular beer is. Its really not important to me, but it does seem to be common question. Going through my records, it turns out that the Maifest and Warsh Pail Ale are our two strongest beers. This makes sense, I guess, because they are both big beers with high attenuation. Attenuation might seem like a big word, but for us brewers, it refers to the completeness of fermentation. Beers that have lots of unfermentable sugars such as those from carmelized malts, don’t attenuate as far. Also, some yeast strains tend to stay afloat longer and ferment more of the available sugars than others, and are thus, more attenuative. The Maifest is a pretty big beer, with no caramel malts in inhibit full attenuation, and the Warsh Pail uses the California V ale yeast strain, which is much more attenuative than our lager strain. Our Schild Brau and Stout have very low attenuation, due to the large amounts of caramel malts in them. I’m happy if either reaches 68% attentuation (apparent degree). The Warsh Pail and Wheat, on the other hand, usually reach 75%. This is how I keep track of fermentation. Its not important what the final gravity is, because that is dependent on what the original gravity was. If you have the two measurements though, you can calculate the attenuation, which will tell you when your fermentation has reached completion.

Ok, that was a bit technical. So getting back to web pages, I’ve updated our links page with links to every Iowa Craft Brewery that actually has a web page. Sadly, I only found two breweries, so I added two Illinois breweries from the Quad Cities (thats Iowa right?) for good measure. I wish more breweries would get online. I have yet to find another brewery running a blog such as myself. If any of you Iowa Homebrewers are running blogs, send me an email and i’ll link you to my page. The only one I know of us is here Trailer Trash Brewing. Appropriate for Iowa right?

It has been confirmed, we are going to be doing a large beer club order, that will ship on February 21st. A beer club is one of several companies that send you a six pack of beer every month. We do them every year, but we usually get the ‘undesirable’ summer months, when we barely have room or time to do them. This is the first time we have ever gotten an order during the slow winter season.. so Hooray!

This order is exceptionally large too. I guess the beer clubs sell more beer just after the holidays, because of the number of people who get subscriptions as gifts. They want maximum of 130 bbl’s of our Colony Oatmeal Stout, and 100 bbls of our Warsh Pail Ale. That would be 1800 and 1400 cases, respectively. WOW!

Of course, they pick the two most difficult and expensive beers to brew! The Stout is difficult run-off for us, and we haven’t quite figured out the best way to dry hop the pale ale. I’m going to be experimenting with bagging our dry hops so that they don’t end up clogging up our bottle filler later on.

The side benefit of this is that we don’t know exactly how much beer they will take until the last minute.. so we have to make extra of each beer. That means that you HOP HEADS will be seeing our Warsh Pale ale early this spring, since we will be bottling and selling all the ‘extra’ beer! This should work out fine, as it looks like the Schokolade Bock will be gone by then. We have only one batch left, and we will be bottling it this week.

We don’t make much per case, but the volume of the order will help us get a smart start on the new year!

Well it has happened again. It happens every year. After the first big snowfall following new years eve, the beer business pretty much just drops off a cliff. The salesroom has been quiet all week and so we have been busy brewing and taking on some new projects.

Brewing has been sketchy thanks to the weather. Today we were supposed to brew, but we had freezing rain. Tommorrow, perhaps.

We did manage to make a batch of John’s Generations White Ale. I tweaked the recipe a bit this time, adding 5% raw wheat in place of some flaked wheat. The GABF judges told me the beer is not cloudy enough and I am hoping this will do the trick. If not, i’ll increase the percentage a bit more next time. I personally can’t see how flaked wheat (which is not malted) is different than raw wheat, but we’ll see. I do know that because raw wheat is very hard it makes one hell of a racket when you put it through the mill! I also almost forgot that we needed more coriander to finish the brew. Thankfully our supplier, Frontier COOP is only 8 minutes away in Norway, so I was able to run over and get some more. We are lucky to be so close to one the major spice suppliers in the US!

Next week we will be having our big annual meeting. We have many things to discuss. Our Total Production for 2005 was up to over 1200 bbls. Rootbeer grew to 918bbls, getting closer to overtaking the beer. The good news though, is that we were more profitable this year than last year. I think this is due to our expansion into the draft market, since kegs have a much better margin. I would have like to seen more growth, but its better to have Quality than Quantity, thats what I always say!

I can say for sure that we will not be doing a Diet Rootbeer this year. I have talked to other people in the Soda industry, and those who do have access to Splenda are spending all the extra cash to hoard it for this summer, when there is expected to be a drastic shortage. I simply cannot get any of the stuff. The good news here is that the price people are paying is less than half of what I thought, so hopefully it will be reasonably priced when I can get some. They are talking about June of 2006 as being when it will widely available again.. so we are forced to delay the Diet Rootbeer until then.

Nutrasweet just is not good enough to mimic our famous Rootbeer flavor. I have also come to understand that Nutrasweet only has a three month shelf life in the warm summer months. If it gets warm it breaks down and becomes really bitter. Our regular soda has a very long shelf life, so long we don’t really pay much attention to it. I would hate to be trying to monitor the shelf life of this new product, we already have our hands full with monitoring the product date(s) of all of our beers!