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      

February Saturday Bluegrass Series

This winter, we’re kickin’ it at our St. Charles brewery with live bluegrass every single Saturday night all through the cold month of February! Join us for our Saturday Bluegrass Series with live bluegrass and a different food vendor each week (some dates TBD and weather pending).

THE LINEUP:

2/3: the Lucky Pickers

2/10: the Woolly Buggers

2/17: 65 North Pickers

2/24: the Rusken Brothers Band

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

Riverlands to Release New Cocktail-Inspired Series of Beers

PRESS RELEASE

Contact: Jeremy Teel

Phone: 630-549-6293

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

11/20/2023

RIVERLANDS BREWING COMPANY CREATES NEW LINE OF COCKTAIL-INSPIRED ALES TO TAP INTO SPIRIT MARKET

ST. CHARLES, Nov. 20 – Riverlands Brewing Company, a small craft brewery that calls St. Charles, Illinois, its home, recently announced a new line of fruited sour ales that take aim at the growing Ready-To-Drink (RTD) and spirits markets and are set to release at their taproom on Friday, December 8.

The new series of beers, Cocktail Hour, features highly recognizable flavors most commonly found in popular cocktails, specifically of the tiki or tropical persuasion. Technically fruited sour ales, these beers use real fruit puree and 100% natural ingredients and extracts to recreate a wide array of famous cocktails.

The first entry in the series is Cocktail Hour: Painkiller. After souring the beer in the kettle and fermenting the sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide, real pineapple, orange, and cream of coconut are added to recreate its tropical, rum-based counterpart.

Served at the taproom in a specialty Tiki glass, a slice of dehydrated pineapple, and nutmeg garnish, Cocktail Hour: Painkiller will appeal to anyone who normally chooses fruitier, tropical beverages over lagers or IPAs.

“One of the things we’ve always felt strongly about is that beer can be for everybody,” says Eric Bramwell, head brewer and co-founder of the brewery. “Many folks think of beer as just one thing that they don’t like. But there’s so much variety out there now. This series expands on that by tying flavors back to cocktails people are already familiar with.”

Cocktail Hour: Painkiller will make its debut on the Riverlands tap list and in four packs of 16 ounce cans to-go on Friday, December 8. Two other versions, Cocktail Hour: Mai Tai and Cocktail Hour: Tiki Whiskey Sour, will be on tap while pours last as well, and Fernando’s Street Kitchen will be serving Hawaiian-inspired food from 5pm to 8pm to help celebrate the release.

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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

It's White Pointer Week...but why?

Hi River Rascals, it's been a bit!  

I wanted to talk a bit about a beer we recently released that's very important to me, more so than the average hazy. Our beer, White Pointer Hazy Double IPA, is a nod to several things, but mostly the hobby of homebrewing... and sharks. That's two things that aren't typically related, right? Well, in this case, they are.

Back in 2012, I started into the hobby that would change the course of my life. My first batch of beer was on none other than the illustrious MR. BEER kit. That first batch could barely pass as drinkable, but the homebrewing bug bit me, hard. 

Fast forward some time and I was brewing full sized batches in my brother and his wife's kitchen. Our Amber Ale, Flood Waters, is a nod to these times, but that's another story. Around this time, Untappd came out and I wanted my friends and family to be able to check in the beer I was making if they wanted, so I thought of the name White Pointer Brewery for my homebrew brand.

You see, I'm a bit of a shark nerd. The numberof shark related TV shows, books, movies, and articles I've consumed over the years is pretty nuts. If you've been in our production area, you'll likely have seen a big poster of a White Pointer, more commonly known as the Great White, on the outside of our office.  Riverlands was pretty close to being named White Pointer, but the lack of sharks around St. Charles, IL, kinda sealed the deal on that one.  

As I got deeper into the hobby, and just beer in general, I decided to start a homebrew blog. Much to my surprise, some people actually read it. For any of you who are homebrewers, I just did my first post in years on that blog and added a scaled down homebrew recipe for White Pointer, the Riverlands beer, on there. Check it out. I was writing the blog basically right up to the start of Riverlands, and you can see the start of some of our beers there. 

While our beer Silt is directly descended from one of my homebrew recipes called White Death, another Great White reference, White Pointer is an all encompassing tribute to my homebrewing days, our sharky friends, and really just the homebrewing hobby in general. Our other Brewer, Nick, was also an avid homebrewer, so it's important for us to pay homage to those roots.

As for the shark end of things, our Taproom Manager, Jeremy, has some fun stuff planned for the next week revolving around this beer and a certain trademarked SHARK related WEEK of tv programming. We think you'll enjoy the fun and the tasty hops.

This poster graced Eric’s walls for far too long. Now, it graces the outside of our office.

WHITE POINTER WEEK HIGHLIGHTS:

All week long, we'll have White Pointer specials going on, programming on the TV, amazing and hilariously awful shark movies, an in-depth look at our head brewer's shark obsession, a giant shark pool floaty giveaway, and more.

Plus...a fully decked out taproom to set the mood.

WHITE POINT WEEK SPECIALS (good 7/23 thru 7/30):
- $2.00 off pints or $1.00 off 10oz pours of White Pointer Double IPA
- $2.00 off 4-pack of White Pointer 16oz cans

White Pointer Week Food Truck and Music Lineup:

Sunday 7/23: Sunday Sessions: Argonaut Company Seafood Pop-Up & Grant Milliren LIVE

Monday 7/24: BYOF, open 4-8pm with 15% off all other drafts and cans to-go

Tuesday 7/25: Hippie Gourmet Grilled Cheese Food Co.

Weds 7/26: Chuck's Wood Fired Pizza & BINGO NIGHT

Thurs 7/27: BYOF

Friday 7/28: The Nerdy Dirty Food Pop-Up & Nicole Devine Music

Sat 7/29: TacoMadre - Food Truck & Avian Aura- Music

Sun 7/30: Sunday Sessions: Fernando's Street Kitchen & Pete Jive plus Open Mic Night with Katie B. at 6pm

Sunday Sessions Return to our St. Charles Brewery this Summer

SUNDAY SESSIONS, our weekly showcase of local musicians and food vendors, return to our St. Charles brewery this summer running from Memorial Weekend through Labor Day Weekend.

John Till, one of our featured Sunday Sessions musicians, plays banjo, guitar, harmonica, and sings vocals.

That ‘s 15 (FIFTEEN!) Sundays of local live music and a delicious variety of food on the patio (weather pending) each and every week.

Weather not-so-good? The food and music continues indoors within the walls of our spacious taproom.

Check out this lineup and mark your calendars to be here every Sunday for a new, exciting, and scrumptious experience like no other in St. Charles.

SUNDAY SESSIONS AT OUR ST. CHARLES BREWERY

Food starts around 12pm, music at 1pm, every single week.

May 28:
Food: Flyin’ Hawaiian Food Truck
Music: Syahi

June 4:
Food: Tamales+
Music: Jason Benefield

June 11:
Food: The Argonaut Company Seafood
Music: Kristin Rose Kelly

June 18:
Food: Double R BBQ
Music: Andrew Huber

June 25:
Food: Flyin’ Hawaiian Food Truck
Music: Lucky Pickers Bluegrass Band

July 2:
Food: Tamales+
Music: Miles Over Mountains Duo

July 9:
Food: My Cocina Grill
Music: Ben & Jake Duo

July 16:
Food: The Curious Crow Pop-Up
Music: John Till

July 23:
Food: The Argonaut Company Seafood
Music: Grant Milliren

July 30:
Food: Fernando’s Street Kitchen
Music: Pete Jive

August 6:
Food: Tamales+
Music: Echo & Ransom

August 13:
Food: Cheezie Mac’s Food Truck
Music: Noah Gabriel

August 20:
Food: Fernando’s Street Kitchen
Music: Nicole Devine

August 27:
Food: The Argonaut Company Seafood
Music: Jim Green

September 3:
Food: Tamales+
Music: Keith Scott Blues