millstreambrewing.com

I’m currently working on the blog. Please enjoy the hold music.

-Update-

Looks normal right? Comments still don’t work. bleh. still working.

-Update2-

IT WORKS! You will note the URL structure of the site has changed subtly. If you linked to a favorite post previously, well that link won’t work. This should be a permanent change though, so no more problems going forward.

Today we are bottling Black Cherry, Rootbeer and Cream Soda. Yes the Cream soda is back, and we are going to try our hand at having three year round soda’s. We are also bottling all of our soda in clear glass for the first time. We think this makes our soda look more like.. well soda! Also, the Black Cherry and Cream Soda are much striking in clear glass. The Cherry even has pink foam head on it!

We had an interesting day today. We were expecting a shipment of six pack carriers for the Cream Soda this morning. But because of delays in shipping (some of which was caused by the tornado mess in Iowa City), the packaging didn’t get here until 2pm, which is usually when we are done bottling for the day. When it arrived, we all got to work, and began to unfold 240 cases of six pack carriers and started bottling the Cream Soda. Four to a case, that is about 1000 six packs to unfold and put into boxes. We had a friend come by to see the brewery, and we pressed them into inflating the six pack carriers! So be warned, if you come by to see us at the brewery, we may have to put you to work!

We have been doing lots of brewing too. We have a Beer of the month club order for next month, they are taking 160 bbls of John’s Generations White Ale and Colony Oatmeal Stout. That is about 10% of our annual production! We will be bottling the John’s in short bottles for the first time. This will make it easier for us to run on our line, as the tall bottles tend to tip over and cause traffic jams! Also we will be able to include John’s in our redesigned sampler packs. You will still see John’s in long necks outside of the sampler packs for a while, until we run out of the packaging. We will then (probably next year) convert them into short (known as ‘heritage’) bottle six pack carriers.

We have not brewed any funky things like the Mystery Saison or Dopplebock that we did last year yet, as we have been plenty busy with other projects, such as the finishing touches on our warehouse. However Buckley and I are itching to do something different. Right now we are planning to make a very small batch of Saison. We have a new yeast strain (thanks to Buckley) that we are playing with, and I think it will make for a very tasty Saison. We are only looking to make about a barrel, and I may reserve it only for beer festivals, to keep something special for those truly devoted fans! John’s Grocery and Old Capitol are having their Belgian Beer festival in May, and we will surely have it for that.

Its been been raining plenty around here. We are very thankful that we have the new warehouse, and we don’t have to run across the street all the time to go get more beer from our old rented warehouse.

Lets see what has been going on around here lately. I have been busy taking trips to see our neighboring breweries. I have visited O’fallon’s in St. Louis, August Schell in Minnesota, and New Glarus in Wisconsin. All these guys are doing superb jobs, and I am very thankful of them taking the time to show me their operations. I want to especially thank Steve Holm, the Salesguy for August Schell who gave a great tour of his brewery a few weeks ago.

August Schell is a quite scenic brewery to visit. They are in the process of building a two million dollar expansion just for visitors, something I will have to go back to see sometime when it is finished.

My favorite part was this tank. It was ‘too big’ for the building, so they just made do:

The owner (the brewery is still family held) told me that the building was too small! I later saw the owner having a beer with the bottling line crew after the bottling run… now that is the sort of work place I would like to be involved in!

In other news, we will be coming out with both Cream Soda and our German Pilsner on the 20th of this month! Yes we will now have three full time soda’s available for your enjoyment. Our soda line keeps growing, even though we really do not spend much on marketing for it!

The German Pilsner is a local favorite. I don’t think you will see it much outside of Amana. If we stopped making it some of the locals around here would be very thirsty and we just have to keep them happy.

Our distribution in Illinois is going quite well. Last week they took kegs of Schild Brau. You will now be able to get that on tap at Old Chicago in Peoria.

And last but not least, this months cute Pumpkin picture, she is really enjoying the spring weather:

Update: Wow people really want our beer on RAGBRAI. Check out this thread at the RAGBRAI forums!