Indiana Brewery News

Calendar marking: Another beer festival is being cooked up by Upland and the French Lick Casino. Great Licks Craft Beer, Wine & Music Festival - French Lick Resort. Noon - 11pm. $25 for both days, $15 for one. May 11-12. For you old-timers, Johnny Rivers is playing on Friday.

The Brewers of Indiana Guild web site has a new, large Beer Dictionary that might be the most extensive on the web. It also includes some short biographies of important beer people through the ages. Enjoy. Send errata to Bob.

The Half Moon Restaurant & Brewery in Kokomo will open in early May but they have beer already. Brewer John Template (please let that spelling be right) from Boscos, Little Rock has been busy with their 3.5bbl system and the serving tanks are already filled with IPA, Wheat, Irish Red, Brown,. Pilsner, and Porter.

They'll be mostly a "meat and potatoes" place that adds a full range of BBQ from their kitchen smoker. Inside, there's a family dining room separated from the larger back side (where there are 29 TVs and 1 pool table). The bar area is grand with a big curved bar facing 5 big-screens.

RateBeer calls Three Floyds the best brewer in the world! Dark Lord Russian Imperial Stout ranks as the 3rd best beer. They also have a list by style. Dreadnaught is the best IPA/IIPA, Alpha King is the best American Pale Ale, Behemoth Barleywine ranks 5th in Strong Ales. CONGRATULATIONS! bonus article

There's a new homebrew shop in Indiana. Riley Ridge Supplies in Lanesville is just off I-64 west of New Albany. They have wine, beer, and canning stuff. We'll get down there soon for a full report. Meanwhile, contact Becky Riley at 812-952-2121.

In Indianapolis, a couple of businessmen are trying to start a company to buy up defunct but nostalgic alcohol brands "that your parents or grandparents once enjoyed, but that now languish." article

Upland has 5 nice new wood casks sitting in the brewery. Four are filled with their lambic brewed a year ago and have been infused with strawberrys, blackberrys, blueberrys, and raspberrys. No set date for the 1200 750s they plan to bottle - they'll let it mature as long as necessary. The 5th cask is only a quarter full and has the left-over lambic to mature and possibly be added to with the next lambic. Yumm.

Liz Laughlin and Jon Simmons of the Indy Rock Bottoms helped Iain Wilson in a 72-hr brewathon to allow his new Orland Park restaurant have a wet opening. They brewed 8 beers, 1 cask-conditioned ale, and 2 sodas in 3 days. Sounds like Jon got to do all the work though.

The Parti Pak in southern Indy is undergoing a major transformation. New beer guru Larry LaFoe is sorting and labeling all the beers with prices, etc. plus Rate Beer and Beer Advocate ratings. It's a long, long project but we're glad they're doing it.

As we discussed last fall, barley prices are going up. Futures prices have risen 85% in the last year and US production has dropped to it's lowest since the Depression. The Depression by gawd. Drought in Australia. Everybody panic.

Yike. Kegs now cost about $128 each. They were about $96 a year ago. That's for an new, empty aluminum keg, not the beer inside.

They're looking for beta testers for the Winerack. It's the bra relative to the Beerbelly. Now you can both sneak booze into the movies.

Yuck. Dram Sandals - shoe inserts with "polyurethane encapsulated canteen in heel with screw cap".

There are two beer mapping sites worth looking at, both using the online Google map as a base.

Headline: Hong Kong - Duties on beer and other types of liquor have been cut in half in order to promote tourism and the alcohol beverage trade.

VinSense has been formed to promote the mail-order sales of wine in Indiana. Also included: a good list/directory of Indiana wineries.

MSN Headline: 32 Things You Can Do with Beer. 1) Bathe in it . . . 10) Pass a kidney stone . . . 19) Catch mice . . . 26) Stop snoring . . . 32) Scale fish. Plus bonus link to hangover helpers.

Eric Watson (of Main Street fame) is the VP and Distiller at the new Green Bay Distilling in, you guessed it, Green Bay, WI. Upon prodding he writes:

Actually, we will be the largest artisan distillery in the country that produces our spirits from "scratch". We will be initially producing vodka, infused vodka, single malt whisky as well as white and dark rums. The majority of our competition is making their spirits by buying neutral grain spirits from ethanol plants and re-distilling it. We will be producing ours from the base ingredients... wheat malt, rye malt and malted barley for our vodkas and gins, barley malt for our whisky and dark molasses for our rums.

Our vodkas and single malt whisky will be produced using organic ingredients.

The single malt whisky will be aged in new charred oak barrels and will see releases at 2, 4 and 6 years. Now... I know, only 2 years of aging? To explain, we are used to seeing Scotch single malt whiskys from Scotland that are aged a minimum of 8 years. This is because Scottish law dictates that producers may only use types of stills that are archaic in their designs. Therefore, the exiting distillate is very rough... sort of tastes like a cross between turpentine and tar! To make this spirit drinkable requires a long amount of aging because of this. Using the current technology, which we are allowed to do, allows us to produce a more refined distillate which drastically shortens the aging time. An example of a single produced this way is Stranahan's Colorado Whiskey out of Denver, CO. Theirs is actually produced by distilling a hopless fermentation supplied by Flying Dog Brewing which is on the other side of the wall in the building next door. When I was judging the GABF last year I visited the distillery and sampled their 2 year release and it was stellar... very comparable to a Cragganmore 12.

Our rums will be released in 2 versions. A "blanco", or white rum and verticals of dark rum. The blanco rum will be slighly amber tinted, unlike other white rums on the market that are un-aged, due to their being aged for 6 months in used Bourbon barrels. Our dark rums will be released in 1 and 3 year increments, also aged in used Bourbon barrels. The first release will be a medium amber and the 3 year release will be very deep amber.

The vodkas do not require aging. We are capable of producing 12,000 bottles per week. Our first infused vodka will be Door County Cherry Infused Vodka. This infusion is based upon the wildly popular cherries grown in Door County, Wisconsin. These cherries share a heritage with the sour cherries in Brabant, Belgium known as Schaerbeek cherries.

In the future I plan to release a couple of gins. The first will be a London Dry style. The other may be Genever, a Dutch style of gin that is very rarely available in the US. I also plan on researching the viability of producing bierschnaaps and possibly aquavit, a clear liquor that is very popular in Scandinavia and the Baltic regions as well as in Quebec, Canada.

We will be distributing in select regions throughout the US and Canada initially. Obviously the most wide area that our products will be available in at first will be the Midwest... yes, including Indiana! We will be meeting with distributors throughout the fall of 2007 to secure these regions. We would welcome any Indiana distributors to call us that may have interest in carrying our products. You are welcome to print or share the contact information below.

If you would like to visit us, we should be in operation by October and would welcome your visit. I will be sending out invitations to our grand opening should you or others like to attend. Our equipment is custom built in Goppingen, Germany is and is quite dramatic. Our 2,000 liter still is 17 feet tall. We have two distillation columns, one that is 25 feet tall and the other is almost 40 feet tall. Our brewing system is also custom made and has a 30 bbl. capacity. We have 4 - 30 bbl. fermenters. All is touch screen automated and process controlled. A sight to behold!

Keep in touch!
Eric

Huh? "MALAYSIA — Customs officers seized 300 cases of fake beer and more than 1,000 cases of empty beer bottles in a raid on a factory outfitted with high-end machines to wash and label as well as bottle beer. The fake beer was said to be murky and unpleasant smelling and as authorities are not sure what ingredients went into the brew, consumers were urged not to be attracted by the lower prices if they found the stuff in local markets."

Sad: Alabama rejects bill to allow beers of more than 6% ABV. Sadder: The quote "The only thing this bill will do is just get our young people dead a whole lot faster." article

Headline: " A Fresh Future for Flat Old Beer". Quote: "Wine expert Oz Clarke called the (1869 vintage) Ratcliff Ale 'astonishing' and waxed lyrical about the taste of beef tea, reduced fish bouillon, jams, smoky charcoal and old leather wrapped in liquorice." article - And yes, that's 1869.

A 2007 study by Clemson University found that the average American walks about 900 miles per year. Another study by the American Beer Institute found that Americans drink an average of 22 gallons of beer a year. That means, on average, Americans get approximately 41 miles per gallon - not bad! Thanks Neil

Last week a Russian fisherman was arrested for illegally entering Japan. He headed for shore in a dinghy to buy a case of beer and got caught.

News compiled by Bob Ostrander, Marketing Director. It's all considered accurate but then Bob has been known to have a drink or two while writing this so-called tome. Views expressed are not necessarily those of the Brewers of Indiana Guild, in which case Bob will lose his job.


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