Colorado Kitchen Brew

Two Brothers Tap House holds a special place in my heart. Warrenville, Illinois is where I was born and Two Brothers is the town's brewery. I make it a point to go there every time I'm in Illinois visiting family. This year marked my third trip to the brewery. The Tap House is inside the warehouse that houses the brewery. The warehouse itself is not exactly easy to find, because it's hidden off of a secondary highway that is currently the site of much road construction. However, the hidden location doesn't deter the locals. I was there on both Tuesday and Friday nights, and the place was hopping. The Tap House has seating for perhaps 90 people. There's a small bar area at the back, while the rest of the seating is made up of tables and chairs. Aside from large prints of Two Brothers beer labels, the walls are bare. Behind the bar is a wall of windows that look into the brewery. The floor is concrete, the duct work exposed, and there are no dividing w...

My Scottish Ale is finally ready to go. First off, my goal of creating a midway point between an 80 Schilling and a Wee Heavy was overruled by the yeast. With a Final Gravity of just 1.008, the alcohol level is only a few ticks below 8.0%, which is way out of 80 Schilling Territory. Oh well. The beer pours a deep mahogany hue, with nice clarity for a bottle conditioned beer. A vigorous pour nets a small nougat tinged head. Head retention isn't quite what I'd hoped for, but a good swirl of the glass brings it back to life. The aroma is exactly what I was shooting for. Deeply caramelized sugars intermingle with a touch of roasted grain. There is very little hop aroma to be had. What's there brings a hint of black tea. In the mouth, caramel, toffee and just a touch of coffee intermingle nicely. Bitterness is very low, as was to be expected. The beer gets a little astringent late, but not overly so. The mouthfeel is somewhat dry and not quite as hefty as I'd hoped fo...

Why; pray-tell, am I writing about a grocery store in a beer blog? Well, John's Grocery in Iowa City isn't your ordinary grocery store. It's actually one of the best beer stores in all of Iowa. I stumbled across John's almost three years ago on a trip to Illinois. This month I was headed through Iowa again and just had to make a return trip. John's is best described as a cramped maze that has everything under the sun. To get to the beer, you have to do a bit of wandering. It's kept way in the back. About half of it is in a tight walk in cooler. The rest is on shelves in a just as tight air conditioned room. Because the space is so limited, John's uses every spare inch of it. Beer is shelved from floor to ceiling and the variety is tremendous. If my budget were unlimited, I could have driven away with a car load of Midwest beers that have yet to wander to Colorado. Import selection was also great, with quite a few beers I'd never seen before....

After nearly two months of fermenting, dry hopping and bottle conditioning (not to mention having to pose for pictures while being brewed ), my English India Pale Ale is ready to drink. Time to find out if the beer was worth the wait. I'll say upfront that I have to be in the right mood to drink a 100+ IBU bitter-bomb. That said, I like a hop-forward beer where the hop flavors and aromas dominate the proceedings. To that end, my English IPA has a moderate bittering addition, followed by three heavy flavor and aroma ones. The end result is a modest 50 IBUs of bitterness, but a heavy dose of flavor and aroma. At 1.008, the Final Gravity is quite a bit lower than the 1.016 my Qbrew software predicted (darn technology). As a result, the ABV comes to a hefty 7.4%. The beer pours about as brilliant a pale amber hue as you can get without filtering. It has a dense eggshell head on top that sticks around and leaves decent lacing. As I wished, the nose is greeted with a healthy dos...

...take another stab at making a Dunkelweizen. My first attempt didn't turn out so great . It actually improved as it aged, but things never quite jelled. I've decided to start over from scratch. I'm hopeful that one of the magic ingredients will be German Dark Wheat. Since my local store doesn't carry it, I ordered some online, because I'm just that insane dedicated when it comes to brewing good beer. The other trick is dehusked roasted malt. In this case, I'm using Dehusked Carafa II. Removing the the husk is supposed to let the malt give your beer a brown hue, without the astringent notes traditional roasted malts can bring. To be safe, I'm using just enough to give me the color I want. My boil time has also been increased to 90 minutes to minimize the risk of DMS (Dimethyl Sulfide) odors in the finished beer that Pilsener malts can sometimes impart. As a final comment, you'll notice below that my Dunkelweizen is a very inexpensive beer to ...