Dylan, World's Greatest Globber

Dylan prepares for karate chop.

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Well, I'm back from blogging vacation and man are my arms sore.  Thats right, two terrible jokes conflated in the first sentence.  You're not getting out of this blogpost alive.  

Firstly let me thank a few local brewers and breweries for once again answering my many questions - Steve, Florian, Will, Phil, Stephan, Otto (x2) (or 's), Marc, Emily, Chris, and I bet I'm leaving somebody out unintentionally... I have a mind like a rusty steel trap.  Anyway, this isn't really a name the brewer blog post, its just that I want everyone to know that all this talk about breweries in our area actually helping one another isn't a stretch or just something to say to be nice.  Its a reality and I hope one day to repay all of you - possibly by showing you how to write a witty, timely, and informative blog post.

Whats going down with Civil Beer?  Well things are peachy - we are getting our keg washer online this week and will proceed to do it to it.  Keg washing is a big deal but not so much a big deal if you don't have kegs!  To that end Jake has secured us another round of kegs to push us near 150 or so which will do wonders for abilities to actually serve you beer.  Our other option was to simply describe the beers in length to you and then charge you 5 dollars, which according to our taste test panel  didn't quite work.  What do they know?

Also going down right now are a lot of 'final touches' which always sounds easy until you realize that staining 12,000 square feet of wood is a 'final touch', and 'touching up' everything you've already painted, and painting the parking lot, and building back bar shelving, and washing 150 kegs, and carbing up beer, and planting a garden are all final touches too.  So is remembering to do a bunch of stuff that no doubt we have forgotten to do.  

Ok, be informative.  Thats what I make the big bucks to do.  How about we talk a bit about how beer is carbed up and I'm not talking about eating a bag of pretzels- though pretzels and beer are pretty sweet.  That was a really lame joke.  Yeast make Co2 as a by-product of fermentation.  Its a thing they do.  Capturing the Co2 and repackaging it for you is another story.  So what basically happens is this - wort is fermented into beer.  (yeah!)  During Fermentation Co2 is given off as part of that process.  You can trap some of that Co2 and either add some from a tank or you can re-condition the beer in its final container by adding sugar and more yeast (bottle conditioning) to get a final appropriate amount of Co2.  Gas is absorbed into cold liquid better THAN (oops caps lock) warm (thats why your warm beer always has a fit when you open it) so you (me) have to get your (mine) beer really cold before you try to add gas to it.  We have a device called a sintered stone that distributes Co2 into beer as fine bubbles rather than as a burst of gas.  Its like the little stone in an aquarium that gives fish oxygen in an otherwise stale existence unless you have one of those really decked out fish tanks with treasure chests and sunken logs and reefs and stuff.  Note to self.  Get a treasure chest for the brite tank.  

As I re-read what I just wrote its painfully clear to me that I left a lot out but hey, thats what another blog post is for right?