So Wednesday night we judged the Iron Brewer Competition!  Iron Brewer is a unique competition we put on every year.  It’s very small and it has one unusual guideline, all of the beer in the competition has to be made with the second runnings from our Golden Barleywine.

Speaking of second runnings I need to give a little technical background here….  One of the first steps in making beer is seperating the sugars in malt from the husks and dissolving them in water.  This step is a lot like making coffee.  Combine water with the grounds, infuse the good stuff into the water to make coffee, seperate it and throw out the grounds.  

When we make our barleywine, we make it so strong, and use so much malt, that at the end of the day there’s still quite a bit of good stuff leftover in those grains.  It’s too weak to put into the barleywine but its certainly strong enough to make lower gravity styles with.  Because we only have one brew kettle and it’s tied up with the barleywine, we really have no where to put that remaining sugar. For years we just dumped it down the drain.

As a former homebrewer I always felt a tinge of guilt watching all of that good wort get sacrificed to the sewer gods.  I remember thinking to myself, “there are probably lots of homebrewers that would kill for that stuff!”  So one year I called the president of our local homebrew club and asked him if he thought any of his members would want some free wort to take home and brew with.  Uhhhh yeah.

The tradition has grown. This January we gave away enough wort to yield 16 batches of homebrew.  We always schedule the Barleywine  brew on a Saturday or Sunday so the homebrewers can collect the wort and take it home and brew it that day.  We also provide the homebrewers with some free Iron Hill yeast if they want it.  So they go home and brew a batch in about half the time and for less than half the money than they normally would.

The first year we did this we were amazed at how different the resulting beers were from one another.  The brewers really put their own spin on everything.  We decided that the next year we’d have to make a competition out of it.

The name is an obvious pun.  Of course the word Iron is part of our company’s name.  But this competition also shares a lot with the Iron Chef.  The participants all start with the same basic wort and take it home to see what they can do with it.  And they do quite a bit.   By adding different specialty malts and by using different varieties of hops and yeast they make a very wide range of styles.  One participant even added some dry grains and made a sour mash!

So the judging that follows a couple of months later is always a treat.  I always wonder what creative processes will yield what sorts of styles as final products.  This year there was a dark Pilsener, a couple of IPAs and Imperial IPAs, a Honey Saison and a Ginger Saison and a Wee Heavy to name a few.  Again, pretty wide range.  Well I can’t tell you who won it yet because Chris has yet to announce the winner to his club.  But I can tell you I was really impressed with a lot of the entries.

I guess I won’t be around for the next Iron Brewer in West Chester but hopefully there will be some eager homebrewers in New Jersey lining up with their plastic buckets when I brew my first Barleywine over there.  Iron Brewer East anyone?