South Union Brewing goes on hiatus

As we speak my good friend for life Ross Anderson is en route to help me bottle my batch of Speckled Heifer. This was my second attempt at this beer it is a partial mash cream ale that is a clone of the popular New Glarus  Brewing's Spotted Cow. While their beer and my first attempt at it were bright yellow. (like it should be) my second attempt is amber in color!! I took a little different approach from the directions and instead of using a mesh bag to mash my grains I went head first and dumped the grains in the water then mashed and sparged using a strainer. This made the gravity of the beer skyrocket and thus I  think I will have a beer that has a lot more body and color to it than it really should. No worries here though that's what this is all about it you win some and lose some.
It is also with a very heavy heart that I have to announce I will be taking a break from brewing for the next few months. With the holidays coming up and other obligations I just wont have the time that this hobby deserves. But no worries I plan to resume brewing some time after Christmas. I was really pumped to brew a batch for my family's Christmas but sadly that's just is not going to happen. Just writing this is depressing me but hopefully after the holidays I can come back with some upgraded equipment and take my brewing to the next level. Until then Cheers and get out and drink as many different beers as you can! These are exciting times we live in and there is great fresh beer coming from new brewery's every where! ENJOY THEM!

And so it goes

Wow I have not posted since April? That cant be right can it? Any way the adventures in brewing continue and I have been able to brew a few beers during the summer. I also joined the IBU or Iowa Brewers Union. This is the local home brew club here in Des Moines. I hope that my club experiences will help me become a better brewer. I look forward to the monthly meetings which are a lot like AA only in reverse. About 50 people show up so there is lots of other home brews to try and the conversation is always informative!

Most of the beers I made this summer were good one was great and one was meh. The main thing is not to lose focus and try harder next time and thats how brewing goes when your just getting started. I am really starting to learn my system and with a few tweaks here and there I feel that soon I can brew consistently good beers. So far for 2012 I have 8 batches under my belt for a grand total of 40 gallons! Yesterday while recovering from an unplanned and very painful dental procedure I found the strength to bottle my 8th batch. This beer is an extract kit from Northern Brewer called Lefse blonde. It is loosely based on a recipe that was supposedly brewed in Lutheran monasteries in Minnesota. Fact or fiction I think this is going to be a nice easy drinking beer. Next up is Speckled Heifer which is an clone of Spotted Cow A popular cream ale that is only available in Wisconsin it will be my second brewing this one. This is a partial mash kit so the brewing process is a little more involved and thus I am waiting for the right time to brew it.

As for the beers I made this summer the one that was meh it was a Honey Weizen. Adding honey to beers will give it a dry wine like finish. While this brew has that then it quickly vanishes and leaves a very blah after taste. I have thought about bringing to the next club meeting and see if someone can tell me what went wrong!  The other brew that was fantastic a simply American Wheat extract kit that I aged on a bed of frozen Great Value brand frozen Raspberry's man that was good! Its almost gone so I will have to brew another batch soon! I also brewed a Rye P.A. which I thought was great but a few club members thought it needed more Rye however they also said it tasted good the way it was. The sad part was this beer was also a bit over carbonated and the bottles had some hop flakes in them as well. This batch taught me a lot of valuable lessons about quality control. Even with those issues it turned out to be a pretty solid beer and it has a great hoppy taste to it so we will put this in the win column as well!

So where does my journey take me next? Well I really want to start kegging my beers sometime this winter as bottling beer by hand SUCKS! That will be a big investment for me but will also be a time saver as bottling can take 4 to 5 hours and you don't have to wait 2 to 3 week to drink it like you do when you bottle! I am also looking at 10 gallon brew kettle so I can make larger batches. Right now I am limited to 5 gallons batches but with a 10 gallon pot I can brew 5 gallons for me and 5 gallons for you. I think this will be a lot better than what I have going on now. I say this because the best part of home brewing to me is sharing and most of the time there just is not enough to go around. One other benefit of having a 10 gallon kettle is that I can finally move to all grain brewing and from there the sky's the limit! All grain brewing will let me not only brew a lot higher quality of beer but also wider variety of beers as well!  Until the next time CHEERS!

Wow what a busy week here at South Union Brewing having a week off has been very good for getting things done! Last Saturday I started my week off right with a tour of Peace Tree Brewing in Knoxville. http://www.peacetreebrewing.com/

Peace Tree is located in downtown Knoxville in an old Nash Rambler dealership. The brewery takes its name after a tree that is now half submerged in Lake Red Rock. It was a meeting spot for Indian tribes back when they controlled what is now Iowa. They have just celebrated there 2 year anniversary on march 17th. I will have to say they have a very impressive operation for there size which I believe was 20 Barrels I could be wrong it seemed like a little more than that. There brew house had 4 glycol chilled fermentors which says there very interested in Turning out a high quality product. Most brewery's this size don't have this  kind of set up. There brew house was running at full capacity every tank was full! Also let it be noted that the sound of bubbling fermentors was competing with our tour guides voice this is the most beautiful sound ever!!

A shot of the 4 Chilled temp controlled fermentors

Now I was shocked to see there fermentors but what really blew me away was every beer geeks dream! Peace tree has a lot of barrel aging going on in there brew house right now! There were at least 2 types of barrels they were using. A small set of Rum Barrels from Cedar Ridge distillery and a bunch of Templeton Rye barrels. The T.R. Barrels are full of Red Rambler and will be released in July  I cannot wrap my taste buds around this!! We also got to sample there Rye Porter which had been aged in bourbon barrels for 1year it was FANTASTIC!!!

Look at all those barrels!

After the tour we spent some time in there tap room which is a nice place to sit back on sip on there selection of beers. I would love to go back and spend a late afternoon/evening there it has a great atmosphere. You may  be asking yourself  is this worth the drive? The answer is YES!

A shot of  the tap room

And a picture of the rowdies who came with me 

And this is where the magic happens!

After the brewery tour we came back to Des Moines I invited my travel companions over and we liberated my beer fridge of  the Kolsch that was taking up space. Since the kolsch is gone now that means South Union Brewing has space to fill up with new beers!! This week off game me plenty of time to do just that!!  I got my Surly Cynic Saison bottled this week and brewed 2 more beers.The partial mash Spotted Cow clone from Norther Brewer and a Honey Wiezen. Here are a few pictures of  Saturdays brew day.

Speckled Heifer boiling away 

My wort chiller in action

And of course the brew master with his lovely assistant brewers

Well there is sure to be lots of racking and bottling in the days hopefully the end product will be well worth the time and effort until next time CHEERS!

Thought I would give a little update! Next week I am taking a much needed vacation!  Federal regulations state that I must take a week away once a year and well my week has arrived! I will be kicking off my Vacation by taking a tour of Peace Tree Brewing in Knoxville so look for a Blog on that. I also plan on brewing my Speckled Heifer Kit from Northern Brewer. Last but not least I ordered 2 more kits tonight both from Northern Brewer. The first is a Rye PA which is now my new favorite style of beer. Founders Brewing which is new to Iowa as of last week makes a great Rye PA.  (you can pick it up at your local Hy Vee). I also ordered a Honey Wiezen Kit this should make for a nice easy drinking beer on a hot summer day. I can't wait to get them brewing !  CHEERS!!! 

Tonight I want to Share the story of Surly brewing with you. Why you ask because it is such a great story! It is a story about a home brewer and a pro brewer who joined forces to make great beer. They were tired of all the bland boring beer that surrounded them. They decided that when you cant find a good beer you get SURLY! It starts with the owner Omar who is a home brewer and is working in his parents abrasives factory in Brooklyn Park Minnesota. He brews a beer to announce the birth of his child his friend's love it and urge him to go pro. His partner Pro brewer Todd cut his chops as a brewer in Oregon and learned commercial brewing big batches at Summit in St Paul. Feeling his art was suffering while brewing the big batches he quits Summit and chooses a suburban Minneapolis branch of Rock Bottom to practice the art of brewing. Omar finally convinces his dad there is more money in craft beer then sand paper and talks Todd into joining forces with him the rest is history! Along the way they are challenged they find it is not so easy to turn and abrasives factory into a brewery open a brewery. They had to clean the factory from top to bottom, they cut a water line with a concrete saw, and the industrial park they were located in was not zoned for a brewery! So Omar starts to lobby local politicians to change things and he wins the zoning. He also is faced with Minnesota's backward liquor laws where you still cant by beer on Sunday which is LAME and you cant sell beer at a brewery? So last year they start this huge grassroots effort and it pays off with the passing of the Surly bill. This bill will allow a brewery to sell beer and food on site. Omar then announced plans for a 20 million dollar destination brewery, beer garden and events center that will increase there production 10 fold. If you have not tasted there beer I will tell you it is fantastic!

There stable of beers is bold and in your face. Bold malts up front and highly hopped finishes all are delicious! There is Cynic a peppery Saison, Furious a hoppy red (my favorite)Surly Bender a brown and then my wife's favorite Moe's Coffee Bender. They also have several seasonal releases the highly sought after Darkness a bold RIS that people camp out for, Wet (fresh hop ale), Surly mild, Abrasive (DIPA)and many many more! While in Minnesota I was lucky enough to get a tour of Surly! Tours are announced on Facebook 3 weeks in advance and all 125 spots book up in about 5 minutes!!! The tour is very laid back each person gets 5 beer tokens and is then allowed to roam around the brewery on there own. A brief and informative history/ QA sesion is conducted and then its back to drinking it is very informal and a lot of fun! While in the cities we had great experience of all thing beer but the trip to Surly was the icing on the cake! Once again Special thanks to my Wife for putting it all together! Maybe we can go back next year ?? ; With there current layout the have managed to brew an impressive 18,000 BBL with a small canning and keg line. They still have some room to grow in there current location. However they have there eyes on the prize! They plan on becoming the Stone brewing of the Midwest and I look forward to there destination brewery! Currently you can only get there beers in Minnesota so if you visit pick some up! ( and get some for me as well!) I have 1 can left in my fridge and I am saving it so it can be used to compare my home brewed version of Surly Cynic with there's! Until next time CHEERS!!!

A row of fermentor's

Another row of fermentor's full of Surly goodness

 They filter there beer  with a centrifuge!!

Pallets of Furious cans await filling

The weather has been so fantastic I have found it a lot harder to blog because I would rather be outside. Brewing wise things are in full swing right now my kolsch is bottle conditioning and my Surly Cynic Kit from Northern Brewer is currently in the secondary fermentor doing a little clearing up. This kit was one of 2 partial kits that I was really excited to try as this is just one step away from all grain brewing. The whole mini mash process was a lot of fun and not nearly as hard as I thought it would be. I took a gravity reading last week after racking it to another carboy and it tasted great despite being a very young beer. I am really looking forward to the finished product some time around June.

Since the last update I have been able to add a few new brewing tools to the process. I now have a wort chiller, a full sized fridge(dedicated to beer and brewing) and what seems like a life time supply of Irish moss. All of these things will help me brew a higher quality and clearer product. I got to use all 3 for the first time on the kolsch. In another week or two I will be brewing Northern brewers speckled heifer Kit.This is a partial mash clone of one of my favorite beers New Glarus Brewing's Spotted Cow. The style is a cream ale and will be great drinking in the warm days ahead! Until the next update Cheers!

 Last weekend the wife and I were able to escape Iowa and we headed to the Twin Cities for some much needed R&R. This trip started out as as a very generous birthday present from my parents. My dad knew that I have been wanting to add a new wort chiller to my brewing arsenal. So he said hey I will get you the chiller but why don't you just go up to the cities and  pick it up at Midwest Supply? What a great reason to go visit my to favorite shops in person!! My wife made it even better by getting on line and getting us tours of both Summit brewing and Surly brewing!!  I cannot believe she got us into both as these tours fill up weeks in advance! I want to thank my parents and my wife for what turned out to be one Awesome trip!!

Standing in Summits beautiful tasting room!
We started off Friday with a stop at Ikea this was the only request my wife had for the weekend. Although the store was being remodeled and the shopping selection was less than stellar we still were able to get everything we were looking for.( including 6 new beer mugs for 1.99 a piece let me tell you at that price you cant go wrong) I now have 6 new mugs but I should of bought 12! That night I made a stop at the 4 Firkins beer store where I stocked up on some stuff you just cant get here in Iowa. I now have a fridge full of Surly and also got some beers from Stone,Brooklyn brewing and Descuhtes.  The next stop was at a small new upstart brewery Steel Toe Brewing. http://www.steeltoebrewing.com/ This happen to coincide with a special event there. It was the release of there new double IPA dubbed size 11! This huge beer specs out at 11% ABV and a whooping 111 IBUs dont worry it tastes fantastic! So I scored 2 bottles of this and a growler of there red Rain Maker.

In the very back of Steel Toes brew house are some Templeton Rye barrles!! Word is there full of a special barley wine they will be releasing soon!

The 3 fermentor set up at Steel Toe brewing

Saturday we had two tours on the books an afternoon tour at Summit brewing and an evening tour at Surly brewing. Summit  is an 800,000 barrel brewery so it is a great deal larger than Steel toe and there 3 fermentation tank setup. The tour of summit was great and to see the size and scale of there mid sized operation was impressive. From the huge sunlit tasting room with a beautiful wooden bar,the large copper boil kettles imported from Germany , the cavernous fermentation room and bottling line that can bottle 1200 bottles and hour.  Summit has built them selves a very nice clean facility to produce some good craft brew!! The best part of a tour is of course the free beer afterwords. Our knowledgeable and funny tour guides made this the highlight of the tour.  It was great to get to have a few samples of there Miabock and relax!!

The fermentation room smelled amazing! There are 24 tanks holding somewhere  close to 880 kegs of beer and each tank was close to 3 stories tall! The equipment in the center is there filtration device it was very impressive. On Monday Summit annouced a 6 million dollar expansion it will include an addition to this room and 2 more beers to there line up one a being a year round IPA and an Kolsch  for the summer.

Summit has four beautiful copper kettles imported from Germany

This is the cold storage warehouse at Summit. The tour guide called it his zombie apocalypse hide out and with this much tasty suds in one place I can see why. This was just a week and a half supply for summit in this room. Disclaimer this picture shows maybe 1/4  of the beer in this room and this photo does not do this room justice !!! On the right you see pallets of kegs stacked five high and that stack is at least 30 ft deep!!

The last Brewery we visited on Saturday Was Surly which I feel deserves its own blog because what there doing there is that great until then CHEERS!!!

Sunday the 19^th turned out to be a very nice day so around 9 or so I decided to play fast and loose I turned it into a brew day. Around 10 I drove over to Beer crazy in Urbandale and bought an extract kit. While they have a lot of kits there, I choose the Kolsch because it was one of a few kits that had specialty grains in it.  To me this kind of kit makes a better quality beer than an all malt kit. I have told myself the first year back I would brew either extract or partial mash. I want to get a good feel for things before I jump into all grain.

The Wyeast I choose swelled up in 3 hours!! it as ready to go when pitching time arrived

I saw the kit came with dry yeast so I ditched that for a fresh pouch of Wyeast 2565 which is a true Kolsch yeast I think the yeast upgrade was money well spent. For being an impromptu brew day the boil part went off without a hitch. Normally I am a stickler for following directions to the letter but this kit I was forced to freestyle a bit. The kit called for a 2.5 gallon boil but I went for a full 5 gallon boil and stepped my grain 5 minutes longer than the directions called for. Also by boiling the full 5 gallons I will increase my hop utilization which to me is not a bad thing Kolsch or not I love my hops!

This 5 gallon boil strategy came back to bite me in the end. I will not have a wort chiller until this weekend and so I was going to rely on an ice bath to cool things down. My first beer the ice bath worked great I took four bags of Ice from the basement deep freeze. I filled the girl’s kiddy pool with ice and water.  This cooled everything down real quick last time this time not so much! I did not have a lot of ice on hand and it was 40 outside not 25 like the first brew day. It took 3 hours to chill it down to pitching temps! After 45 minutes I put it into the carboy and sealed it just to protect it from infection.

 Finally around 7pm it was cool enough to pitch my yeast so I pitched it and wrapped it up in a blanket and left it alone for the night.

Monday morning I went down stairs and BOOM!  The Kruasen had bubbled up through the airlock! I had a very vigorous fermentation on my hands! It was clear the yeast was working great and my airlock was overwhelmed!!! I had no time to correct this as I had to go to work but when I got home I knew I would need to stop at Menards and get stuff for a blow of tube!!!

 So on the way home I got stuff for the blow off tube and rigged it up last night. So far it seems all of the little setbacks have caused no harm!  I did met my OG of 1.42 and my yeast is working great So for now we will let it sit and sometime next week I will transfer to a secondary until then cheers

Beer

Beer What a wonderful thing it is and if you love beer like I do today is a wonderful time to be alive. Gone are the Days where all you had to choose from was bland beer mass produced with low quality ingredients and cheap adjuncts. Today a trip to your local grocery store for a six pack can be a daunting task. The amount of quality beer and styles available to us today is nothing short of amazing. We are witness to a beer revolution that was born in the basements and closets of home brewers all across America. These brewers treat beer as a craft and are focused on making a quality product with quality ingredients that tastes great. It’s nice that these days it is as easy to go to your local brewery and pick up a growler of your favorite freshly brewed beer as it is to go to gas station and get a six-pack. So that brings us to this blog this will be a place for me to share my beer experiences with you.  Topics will range from what I am drinking, what’s brewing and local breweries throughout the Midwest.

Let me give you a little back ground in on me I brewed my first batch of beer sometime in 1998 and I made a few batches until 2000 when I brewed a stout and it went horribly awry and I had to drain poor the entire batch. That experience coupled with lack of a good local homebrew shop I decided to give up. Now after a 12 year break I am back with a new set up and a new passion for home brewing. I just finished my first batch. I started with an Apple Ale kit from Midwest supply it turned out better that could have hoped and with that first batch under my belt I am looking forward to a brewing surge of sorts in the next few weeks. Next weekend my wife and I ill being going to the Twin Cities I have tours booked for Surly, Summit and Steel Toe brewing I also plan on stopping by northern brewer and picking up a wort chiller and few kits until then cheers!