April Showers
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!