Winning Beers, Empyrean Beerquest, Bus Trip Coming Up!

It's good to have wifi.  You can watch College football and brew!

Man a lot has been going on lately.  I have barely had time to sit down.  Between my band, my jobs, and brewing in general it has been hard to find time to sit down and blog.  But today I'm getting around to it.  So two weeks ago the Railroaders had our monthly meeting / competition at the "Blatt Beer and Table."  Which is an outdoor establishment near the new Ameritrade Stadium in Omaha.  The place was really cool and they had plenty of good beer on tap.  But most of what I drank that night (besides some Spaten Oktoberfest on tap) was club beer!  We had tons of entries from lots of new members and plenty of really great beers.  I wish I remembered to snap some pictures.  But I was really into the event and enjoying myself hanging with the guys in the club.  So I forgot.
At the end of the night Phil ended up winning the Style competition.  Which was Belgians, Sours, Saisons etc. (I didn't bring a beer for that competition.)  But I did take 2nd and 3rd place in the "Best Damn Beer" competition.  Which is kind of our "whatever you want to bring" category for every comp.  It makes things easier for those of us who want to make different kinds of beer without a specific style restriction.  I brought my Oktoberfest, and Janet's Brown Ale.  The JBA is not my recipe but it's cool to see how great that recipe does in competition.  Yep yep yep!

So last night I brewed for the Empyrean Beerquest Competition.  I made a Winter Spice Ale for the competition.  As of right now I'm going to keep the recipe on the DL.  But as soon as the comp is over I'll release the details of it.  Not really a big deal.  I just don't know if they'd be upset with me giving away everything in case I do well.  Pat from the club stopped by and we shared a few beers while I brewed.  The beer is mostly 2-Row, with some Sugar added into the wort to raise the gravity.  They had a specific gravity for this competition you needed to hit.  I was a point off so I did pretty well.  So far it's looking good, a bit darker than most of my beers.  But it has a nice "English" look to it.  I made a joke the other day on Facebook telling people that I would name this beer "Justin Beibeer" so that it would have "millions of fans" and win the competition.  While I think that would be hilarious, I don't think I will name the beer that.  Because I don't want people to be distracted by the name.  I'd like the beer to speak for itself.  I would however like to make a beer called that at one point.  Because it would be funny.  It will probably end up being a Light American Lager.  Which would be more fitting.

Pat stopped by and shared some great beer!

The upcoming Railroaders Bus Tour is on October 19th and I have been planning this event for a couple of months.  It's really great getting a big event like this together for the club.  This will be our biggest event we have ever taken part in as a club.  We are getting a 37 passenger party bus together.  Loading it up with kegs of beer (they will not allow glass on the bus, thus...no bottles.  Bummer!)  and heading to Lincoln.  Which is just about 45 minutes from Omaha.  There we're going to visit four different breweries in Lincoln and get tours.  We will be visiting Empyrean, Blue Blood, Zipline and Modern Monks.  Should end up being a really great day with tons of excellent beer.  I'll have more details on that and pictures from the trip up on my blog once the event is over.

Until next week.  Have a good one!