Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Barrel Aged Fireside Chat Release

The release for the barrel aged Fireside Chat will be this Saturday, Feb 23rd.  Tickets will be handed out at 10am.  There will be a 6 bottle limit.  $15 dollars/bottle.  Cash only.  The first 110 people will be guaranteed the limit.  We will also be serving barrel aged Fireside Chat on Draft.  $7 for an 8oz snifter or $3.75 for a 4 oz sample. 

Fireside chat was 1st brewed as a homebrew by Mark Westmeyer on 12-27-2010.  The grist was made up of pilsner base malt extract, pale chocolate, crystal 40, and crystal 60 (and a pinch of Cara Brown).  The hop additions were Nugget for bittering, Centennial, Chinook, and Amarillo at the end of the boil.  See the picture below to see Mark's homebrew set up!




When we brewed Fireside Chat with Mark at Flossmoor Station on August, 1st, 2011 our grist bill was 990lbs of TF Optic 2-row, 55 lbs of TF Chocolate , 50 lbs of Briess C-40, 50 lbs of Briess C-60 and 50 lbs of Evaporated Cane Juice.  The hop additions we used were 352 oz of Nugget and 14.2 oz of Summit for bitterning and 176 oz of Centennial Type, Summit and Galena at Whirlpool.

We did two separte mashes and used the weak runnings from the first mash as our strike water for the second mash.  It was a long brew day but we hit our original gravity of 28 degrees plato!  We used a California ale strain to ferment and the finished beer ended up being 11.1% abv.  Instead of releasing an 11.1% American Barleywine in August, Nick and I decided to take what we needed to enter the beer in the Pro Am category at GABF and barrel age the remaining 11.0 bbls into oak barrels.  We racked out 4 oak barrels with Mark (6.8 US bbls) Feb 5th, exactly 5 months after it had been racked into barrels.  Each barrel tasted different.  We blended all four together and the result is the delicious!

Hope to see you at the release this Saturday!

Bjorn

Thursday, February 14, 2013

Bishop Park Blonde Tapping

Bishop Park Blonde, an English style blonde ale, will be tapped Monday, Feb 18th.  There will be a private tapping for Mug Club members in the pub room from 5-6pm.  Hope to see you there!

Monday, February 11, 2013

Polar Beer Festival

Flossmoor Station is excited to announce that we will be participating in the 3rd annual Polar Beer Festival!  The event is on February 16th from noon-4pm.   It is an outdoor winter event held on the rooftop patio of Rock Bottom Chicago.  The event features strong beers  (over 8% abv) from Rock Bottom and other local breweries.  We will be bringing our recently tapped Russian Imperial Stout, THUNDERSNOW (9% abv) and a taste of our upcoming Barrel-Aged Release, FIRESIDE CHAT (11.1%).  Hope to see you there!