The Second annual Spring Roll, an event to benefit Food for Lane County, is being held this Saturday at Red Barn Natural Grocery and Sam Bond’s garage. Oakshire is one of the many sponsors and if you come down you can score some special edition pint glasses, among other awesome prizes.  The event is a bike scavenger hunt.  Bring a team or come alone, but either way, help out the hungry on Saturday. See ya there!

The following “pile” awaits my assistance tomorrow morning starting at 6AM.

My 3 bay weapon awaits to assist my conquering of the pile.

A brewmaster’s job rocks!  (especially when Joe arrives at 8 and steps in -thanks Joe)

P.S. -a little bird told me a shiny brand spankin’ new slightly more automated keg washer is being built in SoCal as we speak. Stay tuned for details!

Oh, we may not have mentioned to you that Glen’s Hop Vice finished up at 9% abv.  It is a Double IPA with one Malt (Simpson Golden Promise), one hop (amarillo) and an English Ale yeast.  It’s a mouthful to be certain. Look for it at the Sasquatch fest on June 6th. Also, Perfect Storm Double IPA just finished fermenting and is a whopping 10%abv.  Yeah baby!  This one has a melange of  American hops, Organic 2-row malt and our house yeast.  These two beers, although the same style, only share one similar ingredient-water. And we even treated that differently.

These beers will both be served at the Sasquatch fest in Downtown Eugene on June 6.  Look for a sneak peek at the Bier Stein on June 4th from 5-7PM.

cheers!

Matt

The tank shuffle at Oakshire brewing continues.  A 30 barrel unitank (a little less than 1000 gallon tank that can be used for fermentation or packaging bright beer) was taken out of service yesterday as a fermenter and will now be our large bright tank.  this way we can package our new fermenters in one shot rather than split it over two days.  I have a feeling Jeff Althouse could have a good run as a low-cost rigging company if you needed help with your brewery expansion. Pure genius in these pix.

The Leaning Tower of stainless. Check out that rigging job on both sides of the tank!

Hold that chain Chris, don't let it fall!

Boss man inspecting the levitating bright tank.

Ummm.. are you sure this is going to work??

In place with his new brothers. the cellar grows!!

Only four more tanks to move and possible big guys on the way. The fun never stops at Oakshire brewing.

Cheers! Matt

Mr. Weatherman says our weather will be 76 and sunny on Saturday-sweet! You should join us at the Brewers Memorial Ale Fest in at Rogue in Newport. It runs Fri-Sun and we will have Watershed and Overcast.

IF you don’t want to run up to Newport for 50 different breweries’ beer, you should drive over to Madera and take a brewery “tour”. I’ll be there from 12-4. A new Watershed IPA was thrown in the cooler.   I think I saw a keg of Hindsight ESB in there too. And we haven’t run out of our experimental Belgian beers.  Stop by for a taste on Saturday.

….because of the weekends!

Beer writer and friend Jay Brooks of Brookston Beer Bulletin often pens top ten lists. Beers, Places, people, and sometimes not beer related.  After an exceptionally fantastic and relaxing, and well deserved weekend I realized I had an easy top 5 list to share and I’ve only been here 42 days (not that I’m counting). Here goes:

#5 Hiking with my kids at Multinomah Falls

#5B Hiking with my kids (and Nephew) at Spencer's Butte

#4 Voodoo Dunuts in Portland. Yeah baby!

#3 Mirror Pond Pale Ale and a bowl of Chowder at Mo's

#2 Mother's Day on the coast

#1 Oh, yeah, the beer is pretty kick ass too!

IPA week at Oakshire brewing was capped with an exclamation point late last Friday night.  After making 2330 gallons of IPA-ish beers,

hauling around about 6000 pouinds of malt and 150 or so pounds of hop pellets, we just weren’t satisfied.  To test out some malt we acquired, we decided to brew a 5 gallon test batch during the day Friday.  And in honor of the first annual IPA week at Oakshire, we whipped up a Black IPA (why not?)

Rockin out that homebrew system!

Can someone grab me a sanitized carboy?

Although the beer got made after about 8 hours of brewing, don’t come sniffing around the brewery for your first taste of a true black colored IPA.  Due to several unfortunate circumstances (don’t even ask about the hole in the wort chiller-yikes!) it morphed from a weak black IPA to a strong brownish IPA to a brownish weak porter to a strong American brown type beer.  And that five gallon batch could very well be my first ever drain pour in 8 years of brewing.  Or it could be the best thing you’ve ever had. LEsson learned:never try to piece together a quick 5 gallon batch while you are double brewing a double IPA.  whattya gonna do???

Next stop  Brewers Memorial ALe fest in Newport Oregon…

IPA week has begun at the ’shire.  With  a single batch of a Double IPA recipe in the tank, we await a double batch of Watershed IPA Wednesday and a Double batch of Perfect Storm Double IPA Friday. LEt’s just say the cows are happy and the hop contract is getting used (ask a probrewer if that doesn’t make sense).

Today’s beer, called Glen’s Hop Vice is being brewed special for the Sasquatch Beer Festival June 6th.  The Sasquatch fest is held ever year in Eugene to honor the late Glen Falconer, a beloved local brewer who tragically passed away several years ago.  Attending breweries showcase a beer of their choice and have the option of brewing a tribute beer in Glen’s honor.  As Oakshire has done this in the past so too do we do it this year.  The recipe was going to be based on a recipe of mine called Vishnu’s Vice, but when we decided to brew two double IPAs at the same time, we wanted it to be as different as possible.  There fore it is now based on another recipe called XIPA.  THis beer has one malt (Simpson Golden Promise) one hop (amarillo) and one yeast of course (english ale). It  is boosted by a little Indian Palm Sugar (found it finally!)  In case you’re wondering if that is a traditional ingredient in IPA, first, who cares, and second the expatriates traveling back from India certainly could have brought this unrefined sugar with them for UK brewers to add to their INdia PAle Ales.  I know they didn’t, but then again, they weren’t bringing resiny double IPAs either, so there. THe Hop Vice will not have one ingredient (sans water) that the other Double IPA will have.

Anyway, we like to think that if Glen were given one malt and one hop to use, he would certainly choose to use a f**kin’ lot of it. So we did(in fact 44lbs were thrown inthe 15ish barrel batch today and dryhopping is still to come!).  Check it out at the Sasquatch fest in June.

More on the other DIPA, PErfect storm, to come…..

The great people at the Beer Stein in Eugene, Chip, Christina, Dave, and the very valuable bartenders hosted Oakshire Brewing last Wednesday.  What a packed house we had! We poured mostly Hindsight ESB and Watershed IPA since they were on tap there, but we also had a little Overcast Espresso Stout and a growler of a little part of our Belgian yeast testing. That one seemed pretty well received.  Look for a couple of Belgian styles late in the summer.

If you missed this tapping, check back for more opportunities soon.

Thanks Beer STein Crew!

Well we are fully engaged in the social networks these days.  There’s no excuse for missing an event now.  In addition to this blog (which you should be subscribing to the feeds ( RSS button coming soon, I hope), we are also a group on facebook  and would love to have you follow along.  (www.facebook.com  Search Oakshire Brewing).  Finally, we’ve started using the twitter account.  I know, I know, you’re avoiding that worthless piece of time wasting.  I was too, but now I see the value in real time updates for you.  That way you’re just a tweet away from our next event. So, if you currently have a twitter account, follow us at Oakshire (you can also follow OakshireMatt, that will be a little more of what I am doing rather than soley the brewery’s escapades. ) And if you don’t, check it out at www.twitter.com.  It’s easy and fast and doesn’t have to go to your phone. AND you decide who to follow.  It’s like the facebook updates you care about.  Anywaym we have a ton of events going on this summer, and many more will be added.  I want you to be thereso check us out on your favorite social networking doo-hickey.

Cheers!

Matt