On the Road: John's Grocery

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.

When all was said and done, I left with about a case of beer. If you're ever in Iowa City, John's is a must visit.

Comments

Kitchen Brewing Part 3: Sparge and Boil

The mash emerges from the oven. Now that we're finished with Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, it's time to Sparge. As you can see from the photo, the grains have absorbed a lot of liquid. In a traditional all-grain setup, your Mash Tun has a valve at the bottom to release the first running of Wort. The grains are then rinsed with the sparge water to extract any remaining sugars. My stove-top method doesn't afford such luxury, so a different method is called for. The grains have gained a little weight. There are a couple of choices at this point. One choice is to lift the grain bag out of Pot A and place it into the sparge water in Pot B to steep for 10-15 minutes or more. The other is to lift the grain bag up, put a colander under it and slowly pour the sparge water through the grains into the original pot. I prefer the former, because I get a better extraction rate from my grains. All that absorption means that the grains weigh a lot more than they did going i...

Saving Money: Simple Yeast Culturing

A few members of the family I just finished racking my English IPA to a secondary fermentor. As part of the process, I saved some of the yeast in the primary for future use. Here then, is the start of a series of articles on yeast culturing. Back in the "good old days," homebrewers didn't have a ton of yeast choices. In some cases, brewers would even use bread yeast from the baking section of the grocery store. In practice, you hydrated the packet of dry yeast you got at the homebrew or grocery store and pitched it. The packets were cheap and worked, but there wasn't much variety to be had. Nowadays, there are several dozen strains available. While a few strains are still dry , most are liquids that come in pitchable tubes , or smack-packs . The liquid yeasts give consistent results and provide tremendous variety to finished beers, but are pricey. If you only use each pack, or tube once, you will quickly discover that yeast makes up 15%, or more of the cost ...

Kitchen Brewing Part 2: The Mash

Always start your session with a beer. Now that the equipment is together from Part 1 , it's time to start brewing. I'll be brewing an English India Pale Ale for my demo batch. The beer's details will be out in a future blog. Ingredients ready to go. I'm lucky to have a homebrew shop with a grain mill, so I've crushed my grains at the store. The hops have also been measured out ahead of time to keep things simple. You don't have to do this, but I recommend it. My setup. My stove-top setup is pretty simple. Two kettles, a grain bag and a metal spatula are pretty much it. I also like using a hop bag (available for around $5.00), but it's completely optional. If you're doing all-grain brewing, canning pots work best for batches of 2.5 gallons or less. Anything larger and you'll be battling spill-overs. They also work well for partial-mash batches of up to 5 gallons, where you can top off your wort after the boil. We hav...

Colorado Kitchen Brew

Search This Blog