The Seasonal Crunch
We just completed two days of bottling. Yesterday was all soda, Rootbeer and Black Cherry. Today we bottled Schild Brau, Warsh Pail (last of the season) and Colony Oatmeal Stout (first for the season). We would have liked to release our Oktoberfest today, but we had some bottlenecks in the cellar, so we put that off until next week. We were almost completely out of Stout, and there are these certain customers who get quite cranky when the stout runs dry in the summer… you know who you are! So we bottled stout just for you guys!
We seem to have more Warsh Pail Ale left than we intended. This always creates a problem for us since the Warsh is in the same six pack carrier (with the same UPC code) as all of our other seasonals. When the Oktoberfest comes out, you may see our Pail ale dissappear from your local store.. but don’t despair, there will still be Warsh here at the brewery for quite some time!
Actually we often have more kegs than bottles on our seasonals. So if you really want a beer, you can always come out and get a growler even after we move onto the next season.
Our warehouse is nearly done! That is good because the busiest time of the year is nearly upon us. Teresa and Chris have already filled it up full of stuff. All thats left to do is to install the walk in cooler, and get our plumber to finish the electrical and wiring.
I know it looks huge, but really is not. Buckley and I were reminded of this when we payed homage to the old Dubuque Star Brewery on the way back from Madison. The building is located right down by the river, and is pretty damn cool looking. They made beer there from 1899 to 1998, which if you ask me, is pretty damn long time. Chris worked there for several years, and if you ever want to hear some good stories, he has a quite few about the ‘character’ of that old brewery.
September is going to be a busy month for us. Here is the short list of Festivals.
September 3rd Festival of Iowa Beers in Amana
September 10 Field to Family Dinner in conjuction with Devotay
Sept 17th Quad Cities Brew Haha and The Mt Horeb beer festival in Wisconsin
Sept 24th The Iowa City Beer Festival
Oct 1st Oktoberfest here in Amana (oh yeah!)
Oh, one more thing. Not only do we have festivals, but we have two Homebrew competitions coming up. The first is one done during the Saturday of Oktoberfest. The brewmasters judge the beer and hand out awards for the best brews during the festivities. We will be accepting entries at the brewery from 9-5pm from sept 27th until sept 30th and then from 9am till noon on Saturday Oct 1st. We need 24 oz of your beer, in anyway you deem fit to enter it. The number of awards will depend on the number of entries. Last year we gave out 6 awards, three for lagers, and three for ales.
And then we have the Thirsty Classic homebrew competition held here at the brewery on November 5th. This is the real deal, a BJCP sanctioned event, organized and run by Iowa city area hombrewers (THIRSTY). You can find out more details on their website http://www.thirstyhomebrew.org/
August 24th, 2005 at 5:36 pm
Lots of seasonal kegs, eh? How fortunate, as all three of my kegs at home are empty. Looks like I’ll pay a visit to the brewery next week.
Love the old Star Brewery building. How much do you want to bet it will eventually become a mall or meet some other humiliating fate.
Have you ever checked out the “other” brewery building in Dubuque, on Jackson?
August 26th, 2005 at 6:20 pm
No I haven’t visited it. I have heard of it though. A few years ago someguy declared he was going to ‘reopen’ it. That was about as far as he got, as I understand.
I think the best thing to happen to the Star building would be to have it become a brewpub/high eatery… yea maybe with a mini-mall inside of it. The problem is that any project is going to be very expensive… from what I saw years ago the inside is quite a mess.