Most of August

August has been a big month for me: I've done a record amount of procrastinating the past few weeks! Now it's time to get you caught up, so here are the highlights...

• Thursday, August 7: The Princess of Darkness Porter and the Abtskelder Tripel went on tap.


• Friday, August 8: A tour group came in at 9:00am, but by 10:00 Paris and I had loaded up the car and were on the road to Madison.


• Saturday, August 9: The Great Taste of the Midwest! Featuring 115 breweries and probably four or five hundred beers, and attended by some 5,000 beer lovers. We had attended this fantastic fest on behalf of some of my previous employers, and after an absence of a few years, the organizers graciously invited us back. (Nebraska Brewing was the only other brewer in attendance from this state.) We poured the Porter and the Tripel, as they were enormously popular beers from the Egan Brewing days.
  
  
  
  
  
  


• Monday, August 11: Gave a couple of tours this evening.
  
  
  


• Wednesday, August 20: I haven't brewed for quite some time. Lately, it's because my hot liquor tank was significantly iced up on the inside.
  
  But over the past few days, I got it all melted and figured out what the problem was, and today I finally got to brew this year's Oktoberfest beer.


• Thursday, August 21: Brewed a batch of All-American Gold.


• Friday, August 22: Brewed a batch of Toil & Trubbel Dubbel. Gottberg regular John Fredrickson did most of the heavy work, as this happy picture attests.
  
  


• Saturday, August 23: The BrewCast.net crew came to Gottberg to record their 103^rd episode. We visited their Lincoln studios a while back for episode 92, but this time they got to taste the beers in person. (I'll post the link to the show after it's published, probably on Friday.)
  
  
  Left to right: Ann, Ryan, Angela, John, Richard, Brian, and Marisa. Not pictured: Paris.
  
  
  Several of the gang came to our house afterward to enjoy the bounty of our cellar.
  
  
  Left to right: Unibroue Don de Dieu, Verhaeghe Duchesse du Bourgogne, O'Hanlon's Thomas Hardy Ale 2006, Sierra Nevada Bigfoot 2001, JW Lees Harvest Ale 2002, Boulder Killer Penguin, Great Divide Yeti, Anchor Old Foghorn 2004, Unibroue Maudite, Cantillon Classic Geuze, Unibroue Edition 2005, Goose Island Matilda 2006, Eggenberg Samichlaus 2004, North Coast Old Stock 2004, JW Lees Harvest Ale Lagavulin 2006. Not pictured: Unibroue 15, Unibroue 16, Unibroue 17.

I'd like to brew a couple of times this week (maybe even a Weizenbock) and I'm doing a beer tasting in Hooper tomorrow, but otherwise it looks to be a pretty quiet week. Paris tells me there's a trip to Basel, Switzerland in our near future, but we don't know the dates yet.