brewery

Wednesday and Thursday we brewed two collaboration stouts with Nick and Andrew from Three Floyds Brewing.  Each day we brewed two half-sized batches from a single mash to end up with one strong Russian Imperial Stout and one small stout.  It's called parti-gyle brewing and other than making for a long day, it's a nice twist on the ordinary.  You kind of get the best of both worlds: a big syrupy brew to knock your socks off and a thirst-quenching session beer that's more suited to drinking on hot days like we've been having.

Nick wanted to brew an RIS and Jim had the idea to brew the small beer.  Andrew and I pretty much just drank beer while the mash slowly ran off to the kettle and Matty got to come in and work until the wee hours of the night finishing things off.  I think the small beer ended up around 10 degrees plato and the big one at 28.  I thought about calling the stouts Fat Boy and Little Man, but Sodom and Gomorrah have won out as going biblical trumped going nuclear.  We'll name the big one Sodom in the hopes that it really does justify raining hellfire and brimstone down upon our land.

The beers will be on tap at the respective brewpubs sometime in August.

After spending a a few months getting acquainted with our lunch and dinner business, we're now expanding to offer brunch every Saturday and Sunday.  We'll be opening up an hour earlier those days at 10 and have a spanking new menu of yummy egg dishes and more.  Check it out.

Yes, we are open.

Being the great historian that I am, I managed to take one photo on opening night before my camera ran low on batteries.  Luckily a few others grabbed shots, including this one that I've been anticipating in my sleep the last year or so.  Good times all around the first few nights.  Wednesday was kinda chaotic, but it seems to get better each night as we work the kinks out.  Overall, our staff, including managers Michelle & Greg and Chef Jason did a Herculean job of serving everyone and keeping the positive vibe going. I gotta admit that I do feel like I've been run over by a truck. 

We got a little break tonight for the Super Bowl, which was appreciated since we are all pretty worn out after several of us put in back-to-back-to-back-to-back 15-18 hour days.  This blog has previously been about the business and while we start to trot out our beers and dishes, it's hard to keep away from all the navel gazing that I've been doing.

Being 'too' busy is the kind of problem that a lot of people wish for.  We are adjusting staffing, food orders and making more space for the kitchen everyday, but the brewery is slower to respond, which is by nature since beer takes a lot longer to make.   Our first casualty is going to be that we will be missing some of our mainstay beers over the next few months.  Although we have ample serving tanks, we only have four fermenters and people are drinking the beer faster than we can make it.  We are looking for more tanks and trying to make the best use of what we have, but here's advance notice that we are gonna be out of hoppy ales for a bit sometime next week.  Luckily we've got some nice guest brews on, including some hoppy ones like Goose Green Line and Founders Double Trouble  to tide you over.

Also, come on in an enjoy a pint of Eugene, our first seasonal this week while it lasts.  Brewer Jim was wholly responsible for this black beauty that is warming bellies nightly on Milwaukee Ave. 

That my friends is a picture of a frothing kettle of wort.  After several system failures and many, many trips to Home Depot, our brewery is up and running.  The fun part has officially begun.  On Wednesday, we brewed our first batch, Workingman Mild, a luncheon beer.  Things didn't really go perfectly, but that's pretty much what you expect on the first brew.  The steam system in particular has been finicky but in the process of addressing all the problems we've learned the inns and outs of our gently used equipment, which didn't come with an owner's manual.

I've heard an old brewer's superstition that you should toss out the first batch, but this one's already tasting good on day two and there's no sense wasting beer now is there?  We are staining and sealing the bar top over the holiday since the place is quiet and dust-free for a change.  The silence is a nice change since it has been hectic lately with all the finishing touches being made.  I took a few minutes today to just sit on the steps in the fermentation cellar and listen the bubbling blow-off bucket attached to that first brew.  Very peaceful.  I hope everyone else got what they wished for this year too.

I previously blogged about our new tap handle, but got to actually see one being made last week.  Here's a sped up video of one  being cut on the CNC machine:

Here's our tap handle made by Aaron the bar builder:

Jim brewed our third basement batch of Cross of Gold today, mainly because that was what we had ingredients to brew.  We wanted to brew pale ale, but we were short a few ingredients and got started early at 8am, long before Grow & Brew opens.  This incidence of poor planning convinced me that it is finally time to place our first monster order of malt, hops, brewing spices and other accoutrements we need to start brewing on the big system.  It is nice to run around town (or mail order) for brewing supplies at the homebrew level, but it is much nicer to have a truck pull up to your building with 4000 pounds of freshly malted barley and several hundred pounds of spicy, fruity hops.

Unlike hops, which have come down in price recently, one thing that you really don't need to spend too much money on is yeast.  Keep it clean and you can reuse the part of the previous batch and occasionally get a new batch to grow up. Or get a fresh squirt from a friendly neighborhood cerveceria (thanks Chris).  Brewer Jim was very proud of his new wide mouth yeast container that was a big improvement over the half gallon growler:

Now that we have electricity at the building we should be able to test out the grain handling system next week and it will be helpful to have a couple bags of malt around for that.  Unlike the water service which thundered through the pipes with a thud (although we still don't have fixtures) the electric juice came in but didn't really go anywhere at first.  Slowly, the electricians have been running a little wire here and there and lights start working.  Where you once had to run two 50' extension cords to power a saw, there is now an actual convenience outlet.  Yesterday we bought a wood/electric smoker and today 'Danny Boy' the Romanian electrician decided to wire it up and came down to the basement asking us "Are you ready to smoke?" 

The other exciting arrival of the day was the dishwasher hood.  Before starting this project I hadn't even thought that such a device existed to alleviate the constant humidity in the dish corner that creeps everywhere else.  Sure, it is just one more thing to buy and feed power to over time, but it will also help create happy campers.  Gotta keep that dishwasher happy.

Jim and I started assembling the first walkin cooler today for our serving tanks.  It assembles pretty easily, especially compared to the herculean task of moving the 50 or so panels off the truck and restacking them one by one.  We've got a whopping 10 fifteen barrel serving tanks, so in theory we could have 10 different in-house beers serving from tank at a time.  We're putting in a 16-tap system for both the first floor bar and the future bar upstairs.  I'm figuring that we'll have 8-10 or so of our own beers on tap and 6-8 guest taps.  So when are you going to open everyone asks?  Now I say November, but you never know.  Hopefully we'll be brewing in September sometime.  Most of our tanks will be in place in a couple weeks, so that seems like a somewhat reasonable dream.

Barrels become gallons and pounds become ounces, and you can pretty much just adjust recipe percentages and see how it comes out. We went out of our way to cross every 'T' today with our brewhouse calculations and document every aspect. Having been out of professional brewing for many years, I'm a bit rusty but have a couple good Excel spreadsheets that I rely on. Jim on the other hand is sharp as a tack and likes to do everything longhand showing his work like my fifth grade math teacher wanted me to.

First up we brewed Cross of Gold which will be the lightest colored regular offering but it won't be no slouch. It's an American Golden Ale, sometimes called a Blonde Ale. BJCP Style 6b if you are wondering. And while I'm mentioning the Beer Judge Certification Program, here's a plug for their neat iPhone app which I just downloaded. Jim and I used to brew a Blonde at Goose Fulton, but they don't make it there anymore in the age of 312. Our recipe has some similarities to that one and is intended to be dry but with a noticeable hop aroma. Goose used the "clean with a touch of spicy" Mt. Hood hops, but were going with more of a classic American microbrew aroma with some late Cascades and a delicate dry hop to be determined. It's pretty low on the bitterness side and will be around 5.5% alcohol by volume. Today's batch came out of the kettle at 13.5 degrees Plato, a touch higher than we wanted because the basement system's efficiency was a little better than expected.

Our second batch of the day was Iron Fist Pale Ale our soon-to-be have-it-around-all-the-time standby. It clocked in at 16 Plato and Jim was real happy with the color. Here he is adding some Summit hops with a smile:

Jim also came up with the fun name for this one, which he was quick to point out is also a Motorhead song. Mickhail Burton gets credit for naming Cross of Gold and Quenchers' IPA Fest gets credit for getting us tipsy enough to decide to name a beer after a famous speech from 1896 (by a prohibitionist no less). Well with many folks suffering these days from a new economic malaise, the name makes sense to me. On many levels. Sure the speech was made in Chicago, that's just gravy. The connection he makes between cities and farms still stands out to me still today as does the way he makes monetary policy real for the working man. A few years ago I made it through reading William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis, which is all about Chicago's growth being connected with nearby farmland and natural resources. Good for a long summer vacation read for all you farmers market going policy wonks out there.

Rod's Fucking Golden Ale has a good ring to it too, but somehow it just isn't as timeless.

News travels lightning fast these days, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the blogosphere was tipped off that we had hired Jim Cibak as our brewer even before it was official.  For those who don't know Jim, he is not normally someone you would associate with lightning fast news or internet gossip.  He's a warm, genuine and painstakingly accurate kind of guy, and yes he is a South Sider if you couldn't figure that out.  I mention all that because he is going to bring the same painstaking commitment to the brew kettles when we fire them up in a few months. He's already helping to finalize recipes for our first brews and select suppliers of hops and barley.

Jim and I used to work together at Goose Fulton in the early days of that brewery.  He did all the hot side brewing, and I was a cellarman, minding the yeast and fermentation tanks. He went on to work at Three Floyds and then at the award-winning Firestone Walker on their extensive barrel-aging program. Most recently he helped open Crown Brewing in Indiana.

Sorry for the snowy picture Jim.  That's what happens when you use a flash in a dark dusty building, which is what we have at the moment. When not crafting recipes, Jim is helping to sweep up that dust to get our doors open this fall.