Riverlands Brings Home Some Hardware - U.S. Open Beer Championship

Hi, River Rascals!

With the U.S. Open Beer Championship now in our rearview mirror, the fact that we won a couple medals is beginning to feel real. Not only that, but these are our FIRST MEDALS at a brewing competition in the first five years we’ve been in business. And, wow, the recognition humble us…but also feels so good!

We brought home a Gold Medal for German Pils with a beer dear to our hearts, Kayak Pils. You can help us celebrate this win with a pint of the fresh batch that's coming out this Thursday (7/11)!

We also brought home a Bronze Medal in the Mexican Lager/Pilsner category for our Mexican Style Lager, San Carlos Especial. While this mostly seasonal beer is now sold out at the brewery, you may find it on your local bottle shop shelf, and it will be around again in the future.

The U.S. Open Beer Championship is the third largest beer competition in the US, unique in that it allows award winning homebrewers to compete as well. As this is one of the big three, we're blown away to have brought home some hardware. Illinois beer had a great showing this year, with several of our good friends in the industry bringing medals home in some major categories! 

And while beer competitions certainly aren't the end all be all measurement of a breweries success, I'd be lying if I said that seeing beer we've worked so hard on become recognized in a national competition didn't feel really good.  

As for our beer, if you've ever talked to myself or our other brewer, Nick, you know we love lager. Though we came out of the gate with our hazy IPAs and stouts first and foremost on everyone’s mind, many of you will remember that we had a German Pils, then called Yellow Kayak, on our tap list on day one.

Though we've certainly grown the program significantly over the past few years, lager has been something we took seriously from day one. So to say we're thrilled that our two medals came in lager categories would be an understatement.    

Lastly, I'd be remiss if I didn't say thank you to everyone reading this and who has had a pint of these two beers.  If you weren't drinking these and enjoying them, I wouldn't be able to keep making them. 

So…thank YOU! 

Eric Bramwell
Head Brewer/Co-Owner
Riverlands Brewing Company

Our Bluegrass Series Returns in July - Live Music in St. Charles

Bluegrass Fridays, every week at our St. Charles brewery. Pictured: 65 North Pickers duo bluegrass band.

𝐎𝐮𝐫 𝐁𝐥𝐮𝐞𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐬𝐬 𝐒𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐫𝐞𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐧𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐉𝐮𝐥𝐲 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐒𝐄𝐀𝐒𝐎𝐍 𝐓𝐖𝐎!

Join us every Friday evening in July as we showcase a different bluegrass act and food truck each week:

7/5:

Fox Crossing Stringband at 6pm

Fernando's Street Kitchen at 5pm

7/12:

65 North Pickers at 6pm

Dark Horse Grill and Catering at 5pm

7/19:

Rusken Bros. Band at 6pm

Chuck's Wood Fired Pizza at 5pm

7/26:

Pickin' & Grinnin' featuring Amber Berg & Andrew Dylan at 6pm

The Pasta Box Inc. at 5pm

Five Years Gone By...

Hi River Rascals,

Happy birthday to...well, us!  Our fifth to be exact.  While age is just a number, marking our fifth anniversary can't help but feel special.  It would feel special under normal circumstances, but we opened up in 2019.  Two days after our One Year Anniversary Party, the Covid 19 lockdown began.  No one in the brewing industry had any idea what was going to happen, but our local community here in St. Charles came out IN FORCE buying to-go beer, gift cards, and merch to help support us during those unprecedented times.

The next couple years saw things slowly returning to a sense of normalcy, and all of our favorite familiar faces were back in the taproom.  Now at the end of our fifth year, I can't help but be grateful to all the people whose support over this time has enabled us to keep going.

And keep going we have.  In a trying time for beer, we've actually been able to expand our production with the addition of two fermenters, a brite tank, and two horizontal lager tanks that we didn't have when we opened.  Those tanks let us brew more beer, trying to improve our process, recipes, and execution with each new batch.  

Five years in, we feel good about where we're at, but never complacent.  Dialing in a couple flagship beers like Dean Street IPA and Kayak Pils has been a wonderful challenge, but now we get the challenge of making them consistent.  Our goal is to always have these beers on tap, or as close to that as possible.  The good thing about the additional tank space we've acquired over these years is that we get to keep doing these two fan (and staff) favorites while also having plenty of space in the schedule to do new things, as well as rotate in yearly favorites.  That won't change going into Year Six.  

While our fifth anniversary was officially March 15th, we decided to set our annual party for today, March 23rd.  It's going to be quite a day.  No tickets, no sessions, just come party with us.  With food all day from our good friend Chuck’s Wood Fired Pizza, music by Completely Dead 2-5pm and the Semple Band Duo from 7 -10pm, and a whole lot of fun in between, there are plenty of reasons to stop by today.

To assist in letting the good times roll, we have three anniversary beers to mark the occasion. First, on Thursday we released our yearly Anniversary IPA, again a Hazy Triple IPA, with a new blend of hops.  This one, hopped with Citra, Mosaic, Simcoe, and Nelson Sauvin, is our favorite to date. 

Next, we have our yearly non-adjunct anniversary stout release with Riverlands V.  Aged for two years in Buffalo Trace Bourbon Barrels, our stout base, brewed specifically for barrel aging, shines with its rich notes of fudge, molasses, and coffee.  

Last, we have something truly special: Riverlands V Double Barrel.  A first for us.  We took the same stout base in Buffalo Trace Bourbon Barrels and pulled the beer out after a year and put it into a second set of Bourbon Barrels from our friends at Whiskey Acres in Dekalb for another year.  The result was an elevated oak presence with notes of vanilla and maple from the barrel that compliment the chocolate notes from the stout base.  This is one of our favorite beers we've released.  We hope you like it too.

We can't wait to see you all, cheers to FIVE YEARS.  

Eric the Brewer      

A Whole Lot About LaGer at our st. Charles brewery

Hey River Rascals!

I hope everyone had a great holiday season and enjoyed some good beer in good company. When I'm enjoying some beer with friends, it's usually a lager that is calling my name. My favorite lagers are the ones that you can have a few of without thinking much about it, but still complex and flavorful enough that you could also sit with it and pick apart all the little nuances if you feel like it. 

A perfectly poured pint of Biergarden Symphony, our Vienna lager and the first lager using our new horizontal tanks at our St. Charles brewery.

We absolutely LOVE brewing these styles of beers at our St. Charles brewery. In fact, while we may be more well known for hoppier, heavier, and sour beers, we’ve been brewing traditional lagers since day one. It's the process and patience that makes these beers so fun to make. To that end, we invested in some new toys to up our lager game even further.

First off, we now have spunding valves!  “What's are those?” you may be asking. 

A spunding valve is a fitting put on a fermentation tank that allows us to ferment lager safely under pressure. There are numerous benefits to doing this, including reduced ester production, which means even cleaner beer. In addition, some desirable aromatics that would normally be lost during fermentation are now preserved in the beer. Spunding also enables us to naturally carbonate the beer, leading to a softer creaminess that rounds out the drinking experience and improves head retention.  

Two new horizontal lager tanks have gone into our St. Charles brewery, paving the way for fresh waves of beer in 2024.

Next, we invested in some horizontal lager aging tanks. If you've been to a lager-only or lager-focused brewery, you've probably seen these, but they are essentially fermentation vessels turned on their sides. 

What's the benefit of this?  First off, it helps clear the beer out faster as there's not as much liquid height that gravity has to work against to drop the beer clear. That means us having to do less work on the back end to clear the beer out, and that means less stripping of aromatics and flavor while letting the beer get crystal clear.  Aging the beer horizontally also puts less stress on the yeast without the weight of all the liquid on it as it would be vertically aging in a normal conical fermenter.  Less stress on the yeast leads to cleaner tasting beer.

Brewing the best lager possible is a highly process driven goal, and the addition of these new processes in our brewery bring us ever closer to our goal of delivering the best beer we can. 

We are really excited to share the next phase of our lagers with you, and first out will be our Vienna lager, Biergarden Symphony. Between a couple recipe tweaks as well as our new lagering processes, we think this is, by far, the best version of this beer we've put out to date. We hope you come drink a few and see if you agree!

Cheers,

Eric Bramwell
Head Brewer & Co-Founder
Riverlands Brewing Company

It's White Pointer Week...but why?

Hi River Rascals, it's been a bit!  

I wanted to talk a bit about a beer we recently released that's very important to me, more so than the average hazy. Our beer, White Pointer Hazy Double IPA, is a nod to several things, but mostly the hobby of homebrewing... and sharks. That's two things that aren't typically related, right? Well, in this case, they are.

Back in 2012, I started into the hobby that would change the course of my life. My first batch of beer was on none other than the illustrious MR. BEER kit. That first batch could barely pass as drinkable, but the homebrewing bug bit me, hard. 

Fast forward some time and I was brewing full sized batches in my brother and his wife's kitchen. Our Amber Ale, Flood Waters, is a nod to these times, but that's another story. Around this time, Untappd came out and I wanted my friends and family to be able to check in the beer I was making if they wanted, so I thought of the name White Pointer Brewery for my homebrew brand.

You see, I'm a bit of a shark nerd. The numberof shark related TV shows, books, movies, and articles I've consumed over the years is pretty nuts. If you've been in our production area, you'll likely have seen a big poster of a White Pointer, more commonly known as the Great White, on the outside of our office.  Riverlands was pretty close to being named White Pointer, but the lack of sharks around St. Charles, IL, kinda sealed the deal on that one.  

As I got deeper into the hobby, and just beer in general, I decided to start a homebrew blog. Much to my surprise, some people actually read it. For any of you who are homebrewers, I just did my first post in years on that blog and added a scaled down homebrew recipe for White Pointer, the Riverlands beer, on there. Check it out. I was writing the blog basically right up to the start of Riverlands, and you can see the start of some of our beers there. 

While our beer Silt is directly descended from one of my homebrew recipes called White Death, another Great White reference, White Pointer is an all encompassing tribute to my homebrewing days, our sharky friends, and really just the homebrewing hobby in general. Our other Brewer, Nick, was also an avid homebrewer, so it's important for us to pay homage to those roots.

As for the shark end of things, our Taproom Manager, Jeremy, has some fun stuff planned for the next week revolving around this beer and a certain trademarked SHARK related WEEK of tv programming. We think you'll enjoy the fun and the tasty hops.

This poster graced Eric’s walls for far too long. Now, it graces the outside of our office.

WHITE POINTER WEEK HIGHLIGHTS:

All week long, we'll have White Pointer specials going on, programming on the TV, amazing and hilariously awful shark movies, an in-depth look at our head brewer's shark obsession, a giant shark pool floaty giveaway, and more.

Plus...a fully decked out taproom to set the mood.

WHITE POINT WEEK SPECIALS (good 7/23 thru 7/30):
- $2.00 off pints or $1.00 off 10oz pours of White Pointer Double IPA
- $2.00 off 4-pack of White Pointer 16oz cans

White Pointer Week Food Truck and Music Lineup:

Sunday 7/23: Sunday Sessions: Argonaut Company Seafood Pop-Up & Grant Milliren LIVE

Monday 7/24: BYOF, open 4-8pm with 15% off all other drafts and cans to-go

Tuesday 7/25: Hippie Gourmet Grilled Cheese Food Co.

Weds 7/26: Chuck's Wood Fired Pizza & BINGO NIGHT

Thurs 7/27: BYOF

Friday 7/28: The Nerdy Dirty Food Pop-Up & Nicole Devine Music

Sat 7/29: TacoMadre - Food Truck & Avian Aura- Music

Sun 7/30: Sunday Sessions: Fernando's Street Kitchen & Pete Jive plus Open Mic Night with Katie B. at 6pm