Iowa State Fair Oenology Entries!

Hey all! The Iowa State Fair will start on August 7th and many of the best brewers in Iowa, and the mid-west, have brought out their best beers to go head to head. This is the biggest homebrew competition in Iowa. The beers have been judged and, the results will be in tomorrow!

The Freak brothers entered 8 beers. This is a photo of our entries. I feel good about our beers. We entered the following beer categories.

American Pale Ale, American I.P.A., American Stout, Scottish Export 80, American Wheat, Ordinary Bitter, Brown Porter and Robust Porter.

With any luck, the Freak Brothers will have a good showing. I believe our best beer was the I.P.A. This was a high gravity (1.074) , very hoppy (63.1 IBU) , beer. It was excellent in the keg but, after 6 months in the bottle, it really came around. In fact, it was so good, we brewed another batch of it yesterday. This time it may be even better (O.G. 1.076, 74 IBU). The rest of our beers were pretty good too, with the exception of our wheat beer. We must have had some sort of a problem in the bottling process. It tasted very good in the keg but, it was flat out of the bottle. E uncapped it and added a bit of sugar and yeast. I hope that did the trick. Oh well! The bottom line is, we had a great brewing year. During the year we picked up a Blichmann Beer Gun and a few other little toys. We also made a few modifications to the brewery. That, plus one more year of experience (17 years now), should make our beers a whole lot better. I look forward to the 2009 brewing season. It gets better every year. Keep an eye out for the Iowa State Fair Results. I will let you know in a few days how we did. Cheers!