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Another year, another Great Taste of the Midwest.   For the 20th year, the weather in Madison was simply astoundingly good.  The fest was as popular as ever, all 5000 tickets sold out this year in 30 minutes. 

Once again the two most popular beers were the John’s Generations White Ale and our super secret Mystery Saison.  This year the “Mystery” was actually four different Saison’s made up with various Spices.  Buckley and I were not even sure what they would taste like until the moment we tapped them. The beers had changed quite a bit since we first released them at the Belgian Beer Experience in Iowa City back in May.  They had become much more tart, and had some phenonemal ‘belgium’ character to them, including the famous/infamous ‘barnyard’ aroma, thanks to some interloping Brettomyces yeast in the culture that we used.  Our Schild Brau and Warsh Pail Ale were also well recieved, even though there were literally a hundred different Amber beers and Pale ales to try at the fest!

 We had plenty of pre- and post festival fun with our pals from Old Capitol Brewworks, who were just a few booths down.  We were the only two breweries from Iowa out of the 100 breweries allowed into the fest.  We also visited some Madison favorites, such as the Great Dane, Essen Haus, and the cigar bar Maduro.  Maduro has an amazing selection of beers from Bells, including cask conditioned Two hearted ale… yum!

Here we are serving it up at the fest:

Buckley checking for quality control in the morning:

On Friday night we went to visit the new brewpub in Madison, Ale Asylum .  Chris and Otto were very nice in talking to us about their new setup and gave us a full tour.  I have to say, we were very impressed by both their beers and their artwork.  The pub itself has a bit of a ‘mad house’ theme and their catch phrase of “fermented in sanity” is pretty wild.  Actually, Otto related to me they had a bit of fight over that phrase with ATF, who finally relented when they put they seperated the word ‘insanity’ into two words.  Go figure.  If you are into ‘full attitude’ beers ala Stone Brewing, you should check these guys out.  They will be bottling their beers this fall.  Here they are living it up at the fest:

 And then there were the thousands of regular beer nuts at the fest.  This one fits the bill! (this is Steve Slach from Bettendorf, leader of Team Good Beer.)

 And then there were those that maybe had a bit too much.  This guy was pretty much done at around 4pm  0_o

We look forward to doing this again next year.  Remember, when you get our email about the bus trip to Madison, you need to sign up with us immediately!