I know your calendar is filling up fast, but check this out. To show our appreciation for the support our mug clubbers throw at us we will be tapping a 5 gallon keg of this years GABF Silver Medal Winning Cherry Dubbel on Saturday, November 1st at 12:00 p.m. I’ll say that again:

We are Tapping a keg of Cherry Dubbel

We’ll have a little Super Secret bottle conditioned Ichabod Imperial Belgian Pumpkin Ale, a bit of food for your to nibble on a some prizes to raffel off too. Ditch the Bed Bath and Beyond trip and stop in for some ‘Beer you Can’t Get’ beer.

What a weekend! Saturday was Big Brew up the street at Keystone Homebrew AND the Pumpkin fest. Doug, Pete, and I have been meaning to hang with the homebrew crew for a while we were able to do that this weekend. We decided to load up the trusty old homebrew rig and head to Keystone for a little group brew action. For the Big Brew a bunch of Keystone Hops club members get together and brew the same beer five and ten gallons at a time. Everyone except for Dave…he’s a little crazy. All of the brewers put their portion in a barrel and it ferments together. A few weeks from now they’ll divy up ‘the goods’ for consumption. This year Lou at the shop constructed a recipe for Belgian Strong Ale and we threw our 10 gallons on the pile. The fermentation is going on right now in Apple Brandy Barrels in the Keystone basement, and we are excited to see how it’ll turn out. Hey, OUR wort was great so even if the final product is marginal we can always blame Steve Robson…he’s in our barrel too. We turned a few heads this year with our super duper high speed program. People show up at this thing like 6:00 a.m. and sometimes aren’t finished until like four. Now I certianly enjoy a nice long homebrew session as much as the next person, it gives you plenty of time for the sampling of full flavored craft beer, but Doug and I had other things to do so we mashed in at the brewery (check out Doug’s mash cooler), filled a keg with hot water, threw the mash in the back of my car, and hot footed it 2 miles up the road to the event. We rolled in at 10:00 and our kettle was full and boiling by 11:15.  We had our beer in the barrel hours before people who had arrived in the dark of night!!! If you’re not a homebrewer I’ll just say that having an unlimited supply of hot water cut our brew day in half. Lot’s of people were jealous for sure. Jason grilled up dogs and burgers and we had a blast even though it was raining. Perfect homebrew weather: Cold and wet. After the clean up we boogied back to IHB North Wales for the Pumpkin Tapping.

We are now taking reservations for the Fall Beer Dinner. The menu for this event looks great and we are already about half reserved so call quickly if you’d like to join us.

We’ve made it our mission here at Iron Hill to spread the word about how better beer with real food can make your life better. Yeah, that’s right, it’ll make your life better. To be fair, the idea wasn’t ours. It came from our friend Garrett Oliver at Brooklyn Brewery. Garrett has a philosophy about beer and food that we think is right on the money.  Check out this interview with him that appeared in the New York Times titled“When the right wine is a Beer” . Makes you just want to hug him, doesn’t it? He loves to take wine on head to head in food pairings and show how beer basically kicks wine’s butt. In any case, make your life better and come eat and drink with us!

Less than on week until Pumpkin Fest 2008! This Saturday October 25th 2008 will be the first ever Pumpkin Ale Fest here at North Wales. We will be tapping a Pumpkin full of Ichabod Imperial Belgian Pumpkin Ale at 5:00 p.m. (Yes, beer from a pumpkin) The Wizards in the kitchen have put together a full menu of pumpkin love and we’ll have pumpkin beer from other breweries including The Pumpkin Ale from IHB West Chester, Dark O’ the Moon Pumpkin Stout from our friends at Elysian in Seattle (full description below) and a bit of the Weyerbacher Imperial Pumpkin Ale.  We sent some Ichabod Imperial Pumpkin out to Elysian in exchange for their beer and the folks out there when crazy for it. There is even a great review on Rate Beer from their Pumpkin Fest, check it out.

For those of you doing Big Brew at Keystone Homebrew, Doug and I are planning on being there too… so you should be able to do both. We will be going straight from homebrewing to North Wales to tap the pumpkin.

Since his year’s pumpkin ICHABOD ALE is Imperial Belgian Pumpkin Ale, hat means it’s big. At 10% ABV it’s actually really, REALLY, big. We had a bunch of help brewing it from a couple of our staff members, Pete and Lacey. The brew day came of without a hitch and we had a blast adding tons of brewing sugar, over 100 pounds of pumpkin, lots of spice, and our House Belgian ale yeast. It took two mashes to fill the kettle so we could get all of the extract we needed. Here’s a little video clip of Doug adding the very last of the pumpkin meat to the mash.

On tap from Elysian will be Dark o’ the Moon Pumpkin Stout

 

Stop in and join us for a pint or 3. Should be a good time.

Well in case you didn’t notice over the weekend, we KILLED it at the GABF this year. We did get beaten out for Large Brewpub of the Year by Rock Bottom. We won 6 medals, they won 8. I will point out, however, that we have far fewer locations than RB and that 6 out of 7 of our brewers won a medal including 4 GOLDS!!!! Jack Curtin has a complete listing of the East Coast Results over here if you need more details.

Anyway here’s how WE did:  Four Golds: Chris LaPierre, Saison de Hill (West Chester); Bob Barrar, Lambic de Hill (Media); Tim Stumpf, Roggenbier (Phoenixville); Justin Sproul, Vienna Red Lager (Newark); Silver: Your’s Truly Larry Horwitz, Cherry Dubbel (North Wales); Bronze: Brian Finn, Cassis de Hill (Wilmington).

As usual this year’s Fest was the biggest and bestest ever with 46,000 attendees, 2600 volunteers, 432 breweries, 2902 beers judged, and 50+ Iron Holligans cheering us on. No bail had to be posted, and everyone made it home safe and sound. (One of my favorite Mark Edelson quotes is, “The Iron Hill Credit Card is NOT for Bail Bonds!”)

This year’s winner of the Michael Jackson Beer Journalism award was our friend  Lew Bryson  for his story “The Real History of Beer”  in All About Beer Magazine. I hear they won’t be giving out these awards at the fest any more. That might be some kind of conflict of interest thing, but we’ll have to wait and see. I’m just glad Lew got a chance to take home some bling too!

Our Pro-Am beer didn’t win this year, but the category EXPLODED with over 60 entries. That means it pretty much melted down into a best of show competition which makes it nearly impossible to judge. Apples and oranges don’t you know. Here’s a picture of the Pro-Am booth where our very own Dave Grosch’s Dunkles was on tap. It made a fine showing (that’s beer-ese for it all got drank). Dave made it out to the fest this year and had a grand old time. I’m still waiting for the blow by blow but I’ll give a full report on his doings soon. Doug listed ‘bring a medal to North Wales’ as his Bucket List item this year…so he says he’s either got to die now or get a new Bucket List. We are voting for the latter and not the former. The Cherry Dubbel was his idea and credit must be give. Nice Job Douglas!

I’ll have photos and videos from the fest in the next few days. Thanks to everyone who came out to Denver to support us. You guys rock!