millstreambrewing.com

Spring is here, and so its time to drink our Maifest Maibock Lager. Everyone seems to agree, this years batch is perhaps the best ever! Maifest is here! Its time to make plans to be here next Saturday and enjoy Dave Franklin and the Party Time Band, brats, and of course our seven different types of beer and two sodas that we have on tap. The Maipole dancers will start at 10:45am Saturday at the Woolen Mill,and music starts at the brewery at 11am so make sure you get here by then. At this point in time the weather looks good, so lets keep our fingers crossed!

Today we brewed a batch of Warsh Pail Ale getting ready for a beer club order next month. Our new boiler really worked out great. With the old one, it was hard to boil and heat up a hot water tank at the same time. With this one, thats no longer an issue, and it is much more energy efficient to boot! I’m sure this boiler will pay for itself in a year or two. Chris apparently likes it plenty, as he has already cristened it with the name “Puff”.

I was here late last night hand kegging off our Saison Millstream. This is a special beer that I made a while ago with help from Kevin Roberts from the THIRSTY homebrewing club. We used a pretty straight forward recipe, Briess Pilsner malt and Beet Sugar to make a highly fermentable wort. The hopping was light, but we did use noble hops. The real key is the LaChouffe yeast strain (that I cultured up from some that Kevin had), that imparts indescrible complex estery profile. Kind of like banana’s and pepper… ok that doesnt do it justice, you’ll just have to try it! The beer did not want to finish out (something these Saison yeast strains are noted for) so I had to add some lager yeast to finish the fermentation. We decided to traditionally condition the beer, by adding sugar individually to each keg and then letting the kegs sit in a warm place to self carbonate. This beer will be revealed to world on May 21st at the Belgian Beer Experience in Iowa City. We only have 11 kegs of this beer, so i’m not sure how long they will last when we tap them, but hopefully it will be around for alteast a month. Hats off to Kevin for making this possible, I think it has been a big learning experience for both of us.

A final note, I talked to Teresa today and she said there were only two tickets left for our Great Taste of the Midwest Bus trip. Its great to see it sell out so fast! On a related note, today I sent in the forms for the Grumpy Troll Beer Festival in Mt. Horeb on September 17th. If your like me and you can’t get enough Wisconsin beer, this might be something to look into attending. Mt. Horeb is a quaint little town just southwest of Madison, and I expect many of the same Wisconin breweries will be there (though nothing like at the Great Taste, of course).

Today we are shutdown while Chris installs a new boiler. Our old boiler was old.. it was from 1964! Here at Millstream we don’t expect to have state-of-the-art stuff, but its nice if it was made in our lifetime. Our New boiler was made in 2000… thats pretty much new to us. It came from near Sigourney, Iowa, where they were using it to make wood pulp or something. It will be much more efficient and hopefully save us lots of money on our gas bill. It also will be more reliable, the old boiler kept breaking down on us.. usually late at night when I was brewing and the only one here! In fact, most of our equipment failures seem to happen when i’m the only one here… and late at night.. hmmm.

Our lager yeast has been acting up on us lately, and giving me quite a headache. I finally just dumped it this week, and ordered new yeast. We keep our yeast (yes its our private strain) banked off site incase we ever have a problem. I don’t know what exactly happened, but our lager beers started to attenuate farther, and they have an estery profile that is out of place. Its possible they mutated or perhaps were invaded by wild strain. Since we don’t make lambics around here, I decided to dump our yeast. Since the boiler is down, its not a big deal, we can’t brew anyway.

All this led to another innovation. I was so unhappy with the lager yeast, and we needed to make our wheat beer. I just had a Pale ale finish out nicely… and I thought, well why not! I pitched our Ale yeast into our Wheat Lager and walla we now have a Wheat Ale! Its just like the old wheat beer, but with nutty, fruity finish. Also, since its an ale, the beer was done in just a few days. I think this may help solve some of our bottlenecks in the lager cellar. It will also help to keep the Ale yeast going inbetween batches of Pail Ale. Don’t worry, the Schild Brau and other lager beers will always be lagers.. We have always felt that our wheat beer has been ‘missing’ something.. I think this was it. We still have a lager batch of wheat out there, so I don’t expect this batch to be packaged for a couple of weeks, but when it does I’d love to hear what you think!

One more thing, our New Black Cherry Soda is in the Tank, and should be released at Maifest.

Boiler Pictures

I just arrived!

Old guy on the left, New guy on the right

Lets see, two weeks ago today, when I left work I left one of our three hot water tanks filling upstairs. This is usually something I try not to do, but if it happens, there is a float valve that is supposed to turn the the water off, and it that fails there is an overflow tube to bring the excess water downstair to the drains. Well the float broke,and the overflow tube was clogged with hard water deposits, so the tank over flowed all night long. The water flowed into the office, and dripped into the salesroom below. Thus we had the FLOOD!

The cleanup has kept us all working very hard here at the brewery. Thankfully the damage was not as bad as it could be. The salesroom floor is somewhat warped from all the water, but we learned that it has been flooded before, and that the floor eventually settled back down. The carpet was trashed in the office, but amazingly our computer survived even though it was on the carpet! The insurance people have been our here repairing our dry wall and setting up fans to dry the floors and ceilings out.

Here is a an artists rendition of the event.

All this on top of our business really ramping up. People seem to be just clamoring for our beer. Also our Assistant Brewer, Aaron Gerbo has left and has been replaced by our new Assistant, Kevin Buckley. Hooray Kevin, welcome to the team!

Today we bottled the Maifest. I have to say it is very good this year. Its sort of unusual to find this type of beer in the market, a Spring Bock, and it goes pretty quick, so don’t delay! I look forward to a fun and exciting Maifest out at the brewery this year on April 30th!

Also its time to get organized if you are going on our Great Taste of the Midwest Bus trip. Tickets sold out in ONE HOUR last year so if you want to go, fire off an email to Teresa@millstreambrewing.com to ensure yourself a spot on the trip (and to ensure we get enough tickets).