…and the weather is nice! You may have heard, we have brewed up a special beer to celebrate the season. Oktoberfest Harvest Ale is now on tap at the brewery! See the last blog….we picked fresh, raw hops from the porch to use in this beer. We also used some tasty malted barley. Allie will be here servin’ with a smile today and Saturday at Noon. Bring your out of town friend s to see the brewery.

The Fest grounds will be rockin’ hard all weekend. PSB is on tap with DTB, Pale and Lucky Logger Lager out in the beer garden. Entertainment is good this year at the Fest -check out the schedule.

We are working on a new interactive website where our beloved friends can share their PSB-related experiences and photos right on our ‘site!! Randy, our webmaster is working on that. Can’t wait.

That’s all I got. I’m gonna go enjoy a Harvest Ale and hit the Fest grounds, once again, to make sure all is well down there. Cheers! Here’s to another great Oktoberfest!

Yesterday just goes to prove that some days are better than others. Any day that I get to brew some beer on the Mini Mejo is usually a pretty good one. Here’s a picture of four of us brewing the Oktoberfest Harvest Ale ’08. Over on the right is Terr tea-baggin’ the kettle with a sack of raw Cascade hops. This was a fun beer to brew, since we used our very own freshly-harvested hops from off the front porch at the brewery! It was Shawgo, Mike and myself. We milled in and began to mash late morning. The brew went smoothly. We were sippin’ on some bottles of another batch brewed on the Mini Mejo, Belgian Golden Ale done about eight months ago. Very tasty. Terr is the brewery’s not-so-in-house chemist. He helped me do some water calculations for the brew. Terr walked in about 5:00 and helped us to drink some beer and, of course, he came to do some tea-baggin’. Brewed with fresh Wisconsin Crystal Malts, and boiled over an open flame, this robust beer is a tribute to our Oktoberfest here in La Crosse and to the harvesting of our own fresh hops here at the brewery. Bursting with flavor, this limited release beer is only brewed once a year on our tiny, “Mini Mejo” pilot brewing system and is wet-hopped with sun-ripened hops picked fresh and quickly added to the brewing kettle. The Harvest Ale Is a blend of American Pale Ale malt, some medium crystal malts for flavor and color and a chunk of Gambrinus Honey Malt for body. We hopped it with some dried and some wet hop flowers. All Cascades with just a smidge of Galena. I will also be dry-hopping this beer in the fermenter, mainly cause I’m freaky like that. It should attenuate very well and turn out to be a fine beer. We’re real excited about this one. It should be ready just before Oktoberfest and you will find it on tap at the Tasting Room and I have also reserved a keg for Craft Beer Night at Oktoberfest (on Wednesday). Git some.