Schokolade Bock is released
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!