If Wal-mart was a Bar
Tuesday, 14 April 2009, by Benjamin R
Note: Another post dating back to Feb.
Beer connoisseurs rejoiced this week as a new watering hole opened in Chesterfield. The International Tab House (iTap for short) boasts a section of over 500 beers, 40 on tap.
Less than a mile from highway 40, iTap is situated in a strip mall next to stores like “Ooh La La” and “WhipTcream”. Trendy high-end specialty shops catering to the middle class suburban families. True to the neighborhood, iTap has forgone the natural earthy feel found in most bars and pubs opting instead for an artificial, nearly clinical ambiance.
Decorative concrete floors, white walls, track lighting, and artificial wood paneling make up most of the decorum. Accented only by a few pieces of beer memorabilia, none predating Inbev’s purchase of AB, there is little to offer a customer the “Cheers” character they might want from a bar.
Patron Doug Tihen suggested, “It’s like a 7-11 that lets you stand around and drink.”
Despite the obvious shortcomings in the atmosphere, there is still the beer. Lining one wall is a bank of coolers packed with hundreds of brews from around the world. Many are familiar favorites like the entire line from New Belgium Brewery; while others are so obscure you rarely see them outside of specialty liquor stores.
The opposite wall, where the actual bar is located, contains a line of taps that would make even Cicero’s envious. 40 in all, iTap offers a wide variety of draft beers, many of which are never seen locally. I must admit it was cool to actually order a Delirium Timmons on tap.
While the number of beers might sound impressive, the execution falls short. Relying on a good-Samaritan approach, a patron must get the beer they want out of a cooler and walk to a single cashier where they purchase and open the beer. A dishonest person might cut out the middle-man and simply bring their own bottle opener. Furthermore, when business is brisk, the single cashier creates a bottleneck, pun definitely intended.
iTap’s non smoking policy is refreshing. However, it causes groups of smokers to congregate on either side of the front door. As you thread this smoker’s labyrinth, you almost expect catcalls, leather jackets and snapping fingers.
Takeout beer sales are an unusual offering from iTap. Mix and Match six packs range in price. However, a 36-ounce minimum purchase is required. This will wreak havoc on the last-call crowds’ pocketbooks as none of the dozen beers we purchased last night were less than four dollars, most being five.
Holding up four bottles of beer, Byron White, a visiting Arkansas resident, said, “It’s a great idea. I wish we had this selection at home, but it is a little expensive. I just paid $22 for these.”
Traditionally during bad economies indulgence item sales like beer rise. This might explain the packed crowd at iTap last night. However, these crowds will surely thin once the novelty wears off, the price sinks in, and the clear inconvenience of the design becomes obvious.
The Stable Unbridles its Brewery
Tuesday, 07 April 2009, by Benjamin R
Author Note: OK readers, here is the deal, for the last 5 months, I have been blogging...on a private site. I was shopping my blog around with an actual pub, but it looks like the interested party is too broke for any moves soon, so over the next few weeks I'll be reposting my entries here. That being said, many of these are a couple months dated now. I'll do my best to offer any updates were needed. For instance, this article about The Stable. As of today, still no in house brewed beer, however, I believe there is beer in the tanks, so April is still a viable expectation...Enjoy.
Local brewery and eatery, The Stable, has finished renovations to its brewing area and is preparing to start its first batch of beer, a German Helles, in early February. The renovations included major work to the walls, ceilings and floors, as well as the installation of brewing equipment and plumbing fixtures.
The brewing process will take about 60 days, so it will be April before the first house beer is available to the public. In the mean time, The Stable offers a diverse and often hard to find collection of beers on tap. Many of which are not normally seen outside of the brew-pubs they are made in.
The brewing capacity of The Stable will allow for 3 varieties of its own beer to be served. The staff anticipates rotating several types of beer into the mix, although it also plans to have signature brews which will be offered more regularly. Currently The Stable has no plans to bottle their own beer, and is thus considered a nanobrewery rather than a microbrewery.
The final project for The Stable will be to design and bring online a distillery featuring a variety of homebrewed liquors. The distillery process pairs nicely with brewing as many ingredients and pieces of equipment can be shared. It is also not uncommon for brewers to distill lack luster beers into spirits.
The Stable, once home to the horses that delivered Lemp beer, is located in the historic Lemp brewery area of Soulard. Featuring unique architecture many design elements of the original use remain intact. It is one of three breweries opened in the metro area last year despite the rough economic times.
Where Ya Been?
Thursday, 13 November 2008, by Benjamin R
Those of you who look at this site now and then might have noticed there haven't been many posts as of late. This is due to one giant reason. I haven't been brewing. Is your job keeping you busy? Nope. Did you stop drinking? Nope. You're wife got you doing too many chores? Nope. The reason I stopped brewing was pretty much a result of my last blog entry.
That 30 gallons of beer, turned out to be the worse rotgut, nasty ass limbic shit I have ever brewed. I'm not sure where things when wrong, but let me tell you, they did. It was some awful beer.
"Hell, we all have a few bad batches, it's not a reason to stop brewing!" True, very true, and in all honesty, I have brewed a couple of summer beers since, enough to keep me in beer the last few months. However, I was so disinterested I didn't even write down my gravity readings.
I'm actually caulking my lack of interest to a couple of things. This spring I was neck deep in beer. Between Heritage festival, National Homebrew Day, the Stl Brews spring picnic, brews meetings, et cetera, a week wasn't going by that I wasn't doing something beer related. Plain and simple I needed a break. So long story short. Sorry, I'm back.
My first beer upon return is my attempt at pumpkin ale. I've made this beer a few times before, but I switched thing up a bit. First off, I opted for a different base beer (listed in the recipe section). While I usually do a New Castle clone recipe, this time I started from scratch. Second, MORE pumpkin and in the boil! Check out the transfer pics below, and yes…that is pumpkin.
My mom will not shut up about how we never use enough pumpkin/chocolate/vanilla, whatever, her reaction is always the same, more more more. So this time mom, this one is for you. 4 huge cans of Libby's, tons of cinnamon, tons of nutmeg, some cloves, and even a tanker full of vanilla. This is gonna be a slice of pie in a bottle. I'm sure I'll hate it, but hey, I didn't brew it for me.
30 gallons, 3 tuns, 3 pots, & 5 fermentors
Wednesday, 23 April 2008, by Benjamin R
In early May the second annual heritage festival will be held in forest park. The festival is a celebration of local brewers and breweries, and for the first time, the St Louis Brews will have their own tent. In honor of this occurrence, I’ve offered up 30 gallons of my own tasty brew. I looked over the list and opted for a style I didn’t see already represented, Oktoberfest. My current set up can easily handle 10 gallons, but 30 gallons, I was going to need some help.
I shot out a request to anyone who had ever brewed a beer at my house and got a great reception. In all I had more than half a dozen brewers show up to offer their help. I took a page out of the AB playbook and opted for a blending method. First things first though, I needed some equipment. Another quick shout out for help and I secured 2 additional mash tuns, burners, and keggles. It looked like everything was set.
We got started about 9 am on Sunday. The weather looked overcast, but that wasn’t going to keep me from brewing some good beer. We put together a bit of an assembly line and were able to mill up three separate grain bills, all identical. Mash in was right at 10 am staggered by 15 minutes, and we were taking first running’s by 11.
The 15 minute stagger worked out great. By the time one was finished running, there was just enough time to add sparge water and move onto the next. My sparging schedule is pretty strait forward, mash for an hour, sparge for 30, then for 15, then run it strait trough, so by the second sparge, we were juggling all three pretty consistently.
After the second sparge we carefully moved the wort upstairs and got all 3 pots heating towards a boil. Our total volume per pot at this point was about 7 gallons. As the pots were coming to a boil I was still sparging into a bucket and adding it equally to each of the boil pots.
You can tell from the above picture we made the propane distributors pretty happy that day. The boil was pretty simple with only 3 hop additions, 9 total, again we staggered the batches by about 15 minutes, with the first coming to a boil around 12:30.
This was my first brew using a couple of new tools. First off, I recently added a pump to the mix. This was a real life saver, we were able to just leave the pots outside and with the help of a extra long hose, pump the hot wort strait from the burner to the pump, through the CFC and into the fermentors, which brings me to my second new piece of gear, a 14.5 gallon conical. I’ll dedicate a post to this later.
This is where I employed my blending technique. I spread my brew out between 5 vessels, 4 6.5 glass carboys, and my new SS conical, which held about 10 gallons. As we cooled the wort, I rotated though each of the fermentors while my helpers switched out empty pots for full ones. It was nearly perfectly timed. By the end, we had 30 gallons of beer, pitched and stored, and were cleaned up by 2:30. It was a great brew day, if slightly hectic. Oh did I mention harv brewed up another 20 gallons at the same time? I’ll leave that post to him.
Brewing Pliny
Monday, 03 March 2008, by Scott T.
March 2 brought a literal change in the weather. After nearly two weeks of cold, wet, blustery conditions, Mother Nature decided to give us a taste of spring. Temps in the upper 70s proved perfect for an outdoor brew day.
Greg and I had discussed creating a clone of Russian River brewery's Pliny The Elder for some time - hop shortage be damned! Between the two of us (with help from Benjamin, Anthony and Jill), we put together enough hops to make this bitterest of IPAs.
We had never added hops to the mash before!
Whole hop additions were allowed to float freely in the brew pot, but pellets were dumped into a strainer bag supported by a collar. The bag was full at the end of the 90 minute boil. We couldn't have added any more - we had simply run out of room!
The puppies were exhausted from watching us brew all day.
That's Brady snoozin' and her sister Brix in the foreground.
250 IBU's? Oh yeah!
