Five Years Gone By...

Hi River Rascals,

Happy birthday to...well, us!  Our fifth to be exact.  While age is just a number, marking our fifth anniversary can't help but feel special.  It would feel special under normal circumstances, but we opened up in 2019.  Two days after our One Year Anniversary Party, the Covid 19 lockdown began.  No one in the brewing industry had any idea what was going to happen, but our local community here in St. Charles came out IN FORCE buying to-go beer, gift cards, and merch to help support us during those unprecedented times.

The next couple years saw things slowly returning to a sense of normalcy, and all of our favorite familiar faces were back in the taproom.  Now at the end of our fifth year, I can't help but be grateful to all the people whose support over this time has enabled us to keep going.

And keep going we have.  In a trying time for beer, we've actually been able to expand our production with the addition of two fermenters, a brite tank, and two horizontal lager tanks that we didn't have when we opened.  Those tanks let us brew more beer, trying to improve our process, recipes, and execution with each new batch.  

Five years in, we feel good about where we're at, but never complacent.  Dialing in a couple flagship beers like Dean Street IPA and Kayak Pils has been a wonderful challenge, but now we get the challenge of making them consistent.  Our goal is to always have these beers on tap, or as close to that as possible.  The good thing about the additional tank space we've acquired over these years is that we get to keep doing these two fan (and staff) favorites while also having plenty of space in the schedule to do new things, as well as rotate in yearly favorites.  That won't change going into Year Six.  

While our fifth anniversary was officially March 15th, we decided to set our annual party for today, March 23rd.  It's going to be quite a day.  No tickets, no sessions, just come party with us.  With food all day from our good friend Chuck’s Wood Fired Pizza, music by Completely Dead 2-5pm and the Semple Band Duo from 7 -10pm, and a whole lot of fun in between, there are plenty of reasons to stop by today.

To assist in letting the good times roll, we have three anniversary beers to mark the occasion. First, on Thursday we released our yearly Anniversary IPA, again a Hazy Triple IPA, with a new blend of hops.  This one, hopped with Citra, Mosaic, Simcoe, and Nelson Sauvin, is our favorite to date. 

Next, we have our yearly non-adjunct anniversary stout release with Riverlands V.  Aged for two years in Buffalo Trace Bourbon Barrels, our stout base, brewed specifically for barrel aging, shines with its rich notes of fudge, molasses, and coffee.  

Last, we have something truly special: Riverlands V Double Barrel.  A first for us.  We took the same stout base in Buffalo Trace Bourbon Barrels and pulled the beer out after a year and put it into a second set of Bourbon Barrels from our friends at Whiskey Acres in Dekalb for another year.  The result was an elevated oak presence with notes of vanilla and maple from the barrel that compliment the chocolate notes from the stout base.  This is one of our favorite beers we've released.  We hope you like it too.

We can't wait to see you all, cheers to FIVE YEARS.  

Eric the Brewer      

A Whole Lot About LaGer at our st. Charles brewery

Hey River Rascals!

I hope everyone had a great holiday season and enjoyed some good beer in good company. When I'm enjoying some beer with friends, it's usually a lager that is calling my name. My favorite lagers are the ones that you can have a few of without thinking much about it, but still complex and flavorful enough that you could also sit with it and pick apart all the little nuances if you feel like it. 

A perfectly poured pint of Biergarden Symphony, our Vienna lager and the first lager using our new horizontal tanks at our St. Charles brewery.

We absolutely LOVE brewing these styles of beers at our St. Charles brewery. In fact, while we may be more well known for hoppier, heavier, and sour beers, we’ve been brewing traditional lagers since day one. It's the process and patience that makes these beers so fun to make. To that end, we invested in some new toys to up our lager game even further.

First off, we now have spunding valves!  “What's are those?” you may be asking. 

A spunding valve is a fitting put on a fermentation tank that allows us to ferment lager safely under pressure. There are numerous benefits to doing this, including reduced ester production, which means even cleaner beer. In addition, some desirable aromatics that would normally be lost during fermentation are now preserved in the beer. Spunding also enables us to naturally carbonate the beer, leading to a softer creaminess that rounds out the drinking experience and improves head retention.  

Two new horizontal lager tanks have gone into our St. Charles brewery, paving the way for fresh waves of beer in 2024.

Next, we invested in some horizontal lager aging tanks. If you've been to a lager-only or lager-focused brewery, you've probably seen these, but they are essentially fermentation vessels turned on their sides. 

What's the benefit of this?  First off, it helps clear the beer out faster as there's not as much liquid height that gravity has to work against to drop the beer clear. That means us having to do less work on the back end to clear the beer out, and that means less stripping of aromatics and flavor while letting the beer get crystal clear.  Aging the beer horizontally also puts less stress on the yeast without the weight of all the liquid on it as it would be vertically aging in a normal conical fermenter.  Less stress on the yeast leads to cleaner tasting beer.

Brewing the best lager possible is a highly process driven goal, and the addition of these new processes in our brewery bring us ever closer to our goal of delivering the best beer we can. 

We are really excited to share the next phase of our lagers with you, and first out will be our Vienna lager, Biergarden Symphony. Between a couple recipe tweaks as well as our new lagering processes, we think this is, by far, the best version of this beer we've put out to date. We hope you come drink a few and see if you agree!

Cheers,

Eric Bramwell
Head Brewer & Co-Founder
Riverlands Brewing Company

Oktoberfest: What's the Difference Between Märzen and Festbier?

Guten Tag!  Today's Brewer's Corner is distinctly German focused as this is the most wonderful time of the year in the lager world: Oktoberfest! 

We've got our own Oktoberfest Kickoff Party tomorrow, September 16th, at our St. Charles brewery and this year we brewed a special beer for it: our Fox Fest Festbier. 

What's a festbier you ask?  How is that different from the normal Oktoberfest beer I've been drinking since I cracked open an amber colored, caramelly Sam Adams Octoberfest for the first time?  What’s the difference between Märzen and Festbier? Well, I'll tell you.  

I'm not going to go into detail about THE Oktoberfest itself here, though it's a really interesting history that started with a wedding.  If you want, read up on it here: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oktoberfest

In my early craft beer years, I was an Oktoberfest beer fanatic.  Trips to the Bavarian Lodge in Lisle during this time of year carried the same excitement as a kid on Christmas morning.  I loved all the copper colored, malty lagers I could get my hands on. 

The thing I found interesting though when I looked at pictures of Oktoberfest in Munich was that the beer people were drinking didn't look like any Oktoberfest Märzen I was familiar with, it looked more like a golden pale lager.  

Finally, I got to go to Munich in 2010 and experience the Munich Oktoberfest first hand.  The moment I had my first liter of Spaten Oktoberfestbier placed in front of me and took a big sip, I was hooked on Festbier.  Several more liters (too many, I became what they refer to as a "beer corpse") followed as this new-to-me style was immensely drinkable, but still packed a bit of ABV punch.

Sometime after pale lager became the most popular beer style in the world, the beer served at Munich's Oktoberfest transitioned from the more traditional copper/amber Märzen style into the paler Festbier in the interest of drinkabilty, and thus I'm sure, increased beer sales.  Most of you are probably familiar with a Märzen style Oktoberfest beer.  Think notes of slightly toasted bread crust, fresh baked biscuits, and maybe a little caramel while hopefully not ever really tasting sweet. 

The lesser known style outside of the Oktoberfest itself is the Festbier.  This beer is almost like a Munich Helles after it's been hitting the weights.  Everything is amped up, but not into Maibock territory.  Festbier is stronger, maltier, and hoppier than Helles, but never loses that balance and always retains its drinkability.  

So, in celebration of this Tale of Two Oktoberfests, we bring you two seasonal lagers to be celebrated this weekend.  Though both have been on our tap list for a bit, our party is their time to shine.  Scarecrows in Lederhosen, our fall staple since our first year, returns, but no longer tiptoeing the line between the styles.  We committed to the Märzen style Oktoberfest this year with Scarecrows, featuring a heavier emphasis on its malt character. 

We also, for the first time, are serving up Fox Fest German-Style Festbier, our attempt to bring the beer consumed on the Theresienwiese in Munich home to you! 

Enjoy a liter of each this Saturday with me during our Oktoberfest in St. Charles. I'll be walking around in my Lederhosen, hopefully looking in better shape than this picture of me on Oktoberfest day one in Munich over a decade ago. 

- Eric Bramwell,
Co-Founder & Head Brewer
Riverland Brewing Company