Maifest is this weekend!
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).