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The brew went smoothly today. We really need to get brewing though, the beer is really starting to move out of the cellar.

Our Marketing Guru, Teresa Albert, is coming on full time now for the first time (she is giving up her old teaching job) and we only expect good things from this. So Congrats to Teresa! She will be very busy creating great POS material with our new 48 inch printer that we puchased this winter. Bud and Miller and the rest spend lots of moola on custom banners for bars and retail accounts that say happy {insert holiday or event here} day and such for bars. We will now be able to offer the same type of stuff.

Its pretty much confirmed that we attempt our great dopplebock bottling on June 18th. By that time it will have aging downstairs for a good 80 days, a proper lagering time for sure. We are going to ask for some assistance though, in the actual bottling and hand labeling of our special beer. Of course, we will pay you, in beer! More details to come soon.

Wow more good news.. we hit a triple at the North American Beer Awards this year! This is a pretty stiff competition held in conjuction with the Mountain Brewers Festival in Idaho. I bravely entered our Schild Brau Amber, Maifest, John’s Generations White ale, Colony Oatmeal Stout, and Rootbeer into six categories. If your reading this, thats only five entries… I entered the Schild Brau twice, because I think it lies on the border of the Vienna Lager and Martzen Oktoberfest categories. Well guess what, we recieved a Gold Medal in each category! Look at the 2005 winners list! Hooray!

Also the John’s Generation’s White Ale got a Silver Medal! This is just great… we have entered for the last two years, and only recieved two medals, a silver and a bronze.

I hope this is a sign of good things to come at the GABF and World Cup competitions later this year. Those competitions don’t allow you to enter one beer into two categories, so i’ll have to make some tough decisions. Vienna, or Martzen?

It has begun! They are digging holes for the new foundation. The building looks really small to me, when it is just paint on the ground. But that is just an illusion, it will actually be the same dimensions as our current building. I’m going to have to park in the Colony Inn lot for a while, and I’ll keep snapping pictures as the construction continues.

Yesterday we brewed John’s Generations White Ale. It was also Kevin Buckleys second crack at brewing by himself. The poor guy has not had good luck so far. You see, the first time I let him brew, someone managed to bump into the handle of the mill upstairs, tightening it down further. A tight mill produces fine particles that tend to clog the screens of the Lauter Tun, so his first brew was quite a long one. Well yesterday, I somehow managed to bump into the mill in the morning, and we had a very difficult runnoff again! Oops! I think this is the only two times this has ever happened at the brewery, and Kevin is very unlucky… but I can be sure that he will personally inspect the mill gap everytime before he mashes in from now on!

We are breaking ground on the new warehouse on Monday… How cool is that!!!! We really need the space. Last week, the beer club was late in sending a truck to pickup their ten pallets of beer, and we really had some difficult storage issues…. We actually had to bottle less than we could because there was simply no place to put the beer!

Also, we have a new salesroom help. I heartily welcome Chris Hickman, he will be starting.. um Today! Chris let us know how your first day was!Its hard to find reliable help in the salesroom, we are very dependent on our two regular sales ladies, Deb and Gaycia. I think it has something to do with finding people who want to drive all the way to Amana to work every other weekend. Well you know the story.. good help is hard find in any business. We have been pretty lucky to get the people we have.

A friend of mine stopped by the other day and dropped me off some New Belgium beer. I have to say.. it the best New Belgium beer I have ever had! I bought several six packs of it the last time I was in St. louis, and it was all stale. It sort tasted a bit ..brothy! I assume their distributor down there must put the beer out on the dock to make more room for AB. This stuff was fresh from Nebraska, and really good stuff. I really enjoyed the 1554 Black Ale and the new Bier De Mars. The Bier De Mars was like a Wit/Saison with a hint of pepper and Lemon. It is still hard stuff to find in Iowa. I think I heard that they moved into Ohio this year… skipping over Iowa yet again. Oh well, I guess we don’t need the competition! I do find it very interesting that they have entered every state around Iowa (including MN, WI, IL, MO,KS and NE) but have skipped us. Last year they entered California rather than here. If you don’t know, New Belgium is now the third largest Craft brewery, after Boston brewing and Sierra Nevada.

Yes we are still Iowa’s largest brewery. Looking at the numbers from last year in this issue of the New Brewer, I can see that we are still the Largest brewery in Iowa, though Rock Bottom in Des Moines is not far behind. Everyone was in this issue… I will publish the numbers later on.

Wow Memorial Day Weekend was great for us! Good weather, and just a mob of people at the brewery every day. I’d say we outdid last year by a long shot! This year started off pretty cool, I hope it warms up a bit.. you see, warm weather equals beer drinking weather!

Today I got my entry form for both the Great Taste of Midwest August 13th and the Great American Beer Festival September 29-30th. I spent some careful time filling out both. The bus for the Great Taste is sold out! I will be going up with Kevin Buckley to setup the booth the night before. I hope to see you all there.

The GABF is important to us because that is where the most well known beer competition in the country is held. This year, like last year we will be entering our Schild Brau Amber, the John’s Generations White Ale, and our Oktoberfest. Last year we got a Silver for the Schild Brau.. this year maybe we’ll do better! We never actually physically attend the GABF because it is the same weekend as Oktoberfest in Amana. We put our souls into making our Oktoberfest a special event, and it would not be right if we were not present to make sure it went smoothly.

This weekend is Arts Festival in Iowa City. We will be there for the first time ever, serving root beer floats like we do at Jazz festival. We thought we would give this a try, since Jazz fest has been so good in the past, and the Arts Festival seems to be becoming a pretty popular affair too. I’m going to miss it, but Chris will be there on Friday serving up some rootbeer floats for you all. I was able to attend last year, and I was very impressed with some of the vendors. One of them is just a few blocks from us, AJ’s Copper Garden, if you have never been over there after having a beer at the brewery, you should check them out at the festival, they make some really amazing lawn sculptures!