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
Riverlands Holiday Gift Guide
Find all your stocking stuffers and gift ideas at Riverlands this season!
Gift giving doesn’t have to be hard, especially for the beer lovers in your life. Take a look at some of our favorite gift options available this season and visit our online shop to reserve your gifts while you can!
Keep in mind that many of these items are locally made in VERY small batches, so sizes, colors, and item availability may be limited and subject to change.
APPAREL
Give someone’s winter wardrobe a BOOST with Riverlands apparel!
STOCKING STUFFERS
Choose from a bunch of items on our store that sure beat a lump of coal in your stockings!
Specialty Beers
What do beer lovers REALLY want?! BEER! Check out these limited offerings that are sure to be a big hit for the holidays.
Gift cards
Whether you want to give a physical gift card or e-gift card, we’ve got you covered! Stop by the taproom to grab a gift card in person, or order one online to send electrically!
A "New School" Approach to the West Coast IPA
Head Brewer/Co-Founder Eric Bramwell
Today's Brewer's Corner is all about one of our favorite styles of beer: West Coast IPA.
What that means today though can be different things to different people. Some think piney, resinous hops with a solid malt backbone. Others think it's dry and intensely bitter. Neither of these are wrong, but the direction we're leaning is what we've seen recently coming out of California which is a "new school" West Coast IPA.
What exactly is a New School WC IPA, or "California Style IPA"? We are essentially taking some of the things we love about our hazies, but upping the bitterness and drying everything out. Our take on the modern West Coast IPA is creating the perfect vessel to deliver hops to your taste buds. We don't want malt based flavors or residual sugar getting in the way of those hop flavors and aromatics.
That's not to say these beers will be overly bitter, resiney pine bombs. We take a similar approach that we do for our hazies for our hopping. A restrained, but present bitterness, and a heavy focus on late addition kettle hops as well as huge amounts of dry hops in the fermenter.
The beer that results from this approach will be a golden colored hoppy delight. Bitter enough to cleanse your palette and keep you ready for the next sip. Fruit forward hop flavors without necessarily coming across as juicy. Little residual sweetness getting in the way of maximum hop flavor. A clean, crisp fermenting yeast that doesn't create much in the way of flavor or aromatics on its own, letting the hops do all the heavy lifting.
So this brings us to Hornet's Bite, the first of what we'd consider our approach to this style of West Coast IPA. We brewed this beer once before, but tried a different yeast that didn't pan out the way we'd hoped. This latest batch is dialed in the way we plan to move forward for the style as a whole. Hopped with Nelson Sauvin and Mosaic hops, this beer will have notes of white grape, citrus, blueberry, with a background herbal note and just enough bitterness to keep it refreshing. We REALLY like how this batch came out and we hope you will too.
While we will continue to brew and improve our haze game, we're very excited to further explore this version of West Coast IPA. Expect to see more of these on our taps and out in distribution. There's a wide world of hops out there, and this is another wonderful style to explore them.
Cheers!
Eric Bramwell
Head Brewer/Co-founder
Riverlands Brewing Company
Brewer's Corner: Get Ready for Your Barrel Aged Summer
Some things are worth the wait. With this edition of our Brewer's Corner, I want to talk to you about our barrel program, and what's coming down the pipeline this summer and beyond.
Since we opened in 2019, every time we brewed an imperial stout, we would fill and stash away a couple of bourbon barrels out of each batch. Two barrels here, two barrels there, over the course of that first year. SLOWLY, we began to build our stock up, but our first few releases were small by necessity.
As we got a better handle on our production schedule, we started putting a couple of full batches of stout into barrels to build supply further. During the pandemic shutdown, we took some of that dreary down time to further build up our supply of barrels. Now, we were able to do a few more releases, adding a third, sometimes even a fourth barrel per release, getting more beer into more people's hands. We even got some fun collaborations with some of our favorite brewers into barrels for future releases.
As time went on, we were able to tailor unique stout recipes specifically designed to stand up to the barrel aging process, such as the base for our non-adjunct stout, Tranquil. We were able to source barrels that are unique and from highly respected distilleries, and we've got a few that we're particularly excited about. As of this writing, we have over 80 barrels filled with stout, porter, a gose, and an experimental Acid Rainbow in a red wine barrel that we threw a ton of wild yeast into. 80 barrels will seem like small potatoes to some, a ton to others, but for us, we worked hard to carefully build and manage that supply.
That brings us to our Barrel Aged Summer, which may actually turn into a Barrel Aged Year. The fruits of our labor over the past year and a half are now beginning to pay off and we have a whole bunch of barrels that are ready to be pulled, packaged, and drunk. Over the course of the coming months, we plan to release a new barrel aged beer every month, possibly even more than one. Some barrel aged versions of some of your favorite stouts over the past year will see the light of day, including some pretty exciting collabs, and we'll have a few new ones too. We've been able to let these beers sit in the barrel for the proper amount of time, some being a year, others up to 18 months. Patience is the key when building these programs, and while that's not always easy, it pays off.
Barrel Aged Ice Cream Carton
Our first release of your Barrel Aged Summer: a Neapolitan Stout brewed with cacao nibs, strawberry, and vanilla, aged in hand selected Wild Turkey bourbon barrels.
The first release of our Barrel Aged Summer is Barrel Aged Ice Cream Carton. When we pulled the beer out of the Wild Turkey Bourbon barrels, our first thought was bourbon infused fudge. We're adding cocoa nibs to this beer, but it almost didn't need to. In addition to the nibs, big doses of strawberry and vanilla round out this Neapolitan Stout. We feel like the barrel aging treatment is a big improvement to what was already a delicious stout.
This release will happen IN-PERSON at our brewery in St. Charles, Illinois, at noon, Saturday, May 28. We’ve been longing to return to in-person, out-the-back bottle releases for quite some time. Join us, grab your bottles, and hit the taproom afterwards to try this and 15 other beers on tap.
Keep tabs on our social media for more info on additional Barrel Aged Summer (and then some) releases. There's going to be some fun stuff rolling out, and we can’t wait to share it with all of you: guests, friends, and collaborators.
- Eric Bramwell, Head Brewer and Co-Founder, Riverlands Brewing Company
Announcing Our New Ongoing Charity Drive: RMHC-CNI
At Riverlands, we’ve done our best over the past three years of operation to give back to our Tri-Cities communities and charities that hold a special place in our hearts. Through food and clothing drives, school supply programs and head shaving events for pediatric cancer research, we’ve found unique and fun ways to raise awareness and funds for various causes.
Recently, we asked ourselves…what’s a way we can give back on a daily basis over an extended period of time? The answer: COLLECTING CAN TABS FOR RONALD MCDONALD HOUSE CHARITIES OF CHICAGOLAND & NORTHWEST INDIANA.
For those who don’t know, RMHC-CNI provides “Housing, Support, and Community So Families with Sick Children Can Stay Together.”
WHY COLLECT CAN TABS? Several reasons:
It’s something simple we can all do.
It’s something we have PLENTY of access to.
It supports our company values of continuously becoming better stewards of the environment.
It helps support a GREAT and LOCAL cause by raising funds for Ronald McDonald House Charities of Chicagoland & Northwest Indiana.
All collected tabs will be donated to RMHC-CNI. In turn, their partner United Scrap Metal buys the tabs at the current market value of aluminum and make an additional charitable contribution as well.
HOW CAN YOU HELP? Simple.
At the taproom: Order a can pour! We’ll immediately pull off and donate your can tab when you finish your beer.
At home and abroad: Start pulling can tabs off your cans, rinse and collect them. Once you have a full container (zip lock bag, small box, shoe box, whatever!) , bring them to our taproom where they’ll be added to our collection vase.
Once we’ve gathered a sizable donation, we’ll weigh and turn them in!
OUR GOAL: Collect a million tabs (789.27 pounds!) and become a member of the Thanks-A-Million Program. With your help, we can do it! Start collecting tabs today and turn them in when you visit us.
A Heartfelt THANK YOU for our Successful St. Baldrick's Event
Last year, March 2021, a new tradition was started at our brewery in St. Charles: our annual St. Baldrick’s Foundation fundraiser and head shaving event. It was a great success, and we decided immediately to continue holding this event for the foreseeable future.
Fast forward to this year and we find ourselves once again humbled by the outpouring of support for this year’s fundraiser. With just seven participants signed up to be shaved, we were still able to not just meet, but CRUSH $10,000 goal. Total online and cash donations have now exceeded $11,000 dollars and counting.
One thing is for sure…one participant has gone above and beyond the call of duty at our event both years, and despite his currently tiny stature, his big heart has virtually carried our events! Sam Welch lost his cousin, Emma, to childhood cancer a few years back, and ever since, he has shaved his head once per year to raise awareness and funds for pediatric cancer research in her name. We couldn’t be more honored to host Sam again this year and watch him smash the “competition” with well over $6,200 in donations! Not to mention his amazing family who came out in high numbers to support our event!
Thank you, Sam, as well as ALL of our shavees (Michael Dotson, Derek Weber, Matt Milligan, JD Orlicz, Eric Blackburn, Jeremy Teel, , for inspiring us again this year and helping us reach our fundraising goal!
Although our goal has been met, we’re STILL collecting donations of either cash at the taproom or virtually through the St. Baldrick’s event site until the end of March. Be a hero, like Sam and our other shavees, without harming a hair on your head. Donate today.
Not Pictured, But Also Awesome: Eric Blackburn, Jeremy Teel
Riverlands: Year Three Anniversary Details
At noon today, tickets for our three year anniversary party on March 19 go on sale. Here are some important details to keep in mind before purchasing tickets to this year’s event.
1) This is a strictly 21-and-over ticketed event and we will be closed to the general public. There are currently no DD ticket options as we need to fill every seat with folks who are “here for the beer.” We highly suggest using Uber or having a DD lined up to pick you up after the event.
2) Tickets are sold by the TABLE. This means you can purchase a single bar seat, or a table for two, four, or six people. Tables are VERY limited, so get your crew lined up before purchasing.
3) There are three sessions to choose from: 12-2pm, 3-5pm, and 6-8pm. Limit ONE SESSION PER PERSON/PARTY.
4) Your $40 ticket includes:
- admittance to your session
- three beers off the menu, and up to ONE 5oz pour of Riverlands III BA Imperial Stout
- one 11.5oz gold rimmed Year Three glass
- guaranteed option to buy up to two bottles of RL3 (NOT INCLUDED IN TICKET PRICE)
- Live music throughout the day
- Other special secret BA tappings for each session
5) Show up hungry! Fire & Smoke BBQ will be serving all day. Food purchases are separate from ticket price.
Can’t make it to the party but still want to purchase bottles? Any leftover bottles will go on sale the FOLLOWING WEDNESDAY, MARCH 23. Keep an eye on our social channels for any potential buying opportunities.