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

Sunday Sessions Return for Summer 2024 - Live Music in St. Charles

SUNDAY SESSIONS, our weekly live music and local food showcase, returns to Riverlands Brewing starting Sunday, April 28 and running all summer long through Labor Day weekend, Sunday, September 1.

Each week, our St. Charles brewery pairs up a local food truck with live music to bring you an afternoon experience you won’t forget on our family-friendly patio.

SCHEDULE:
(subject to change due to weather and other factors)

April 28
Food: El Mezcalito Mexican Food Truck 12pm to 8pm
Music: Jim Gruden 1pm to 4pm

May 5
Food: Fernando’s Street Kitchen 12pm to 4pm
Music: Matt Keen 1pm to 4pm

May 12 - Mother’s Day
Food: Fernando’s Mother’s Day Brunch 11am to 4pm
Music: Grant Milliren 1pm to 4pm

May 19
Food: Stadium Street Eats 12pm to 8pm
Music: Joey Wilbur 1pm to 4pm
PLUS: TURTLE RACES 1pm to 4pm

May 26
Food: Monk’s Mobile Kitchen (burgers and more) 12pm to 4pm
Music: Jason Moon 1pm to 3pm

June 2
Food: Waffadilla 12pm to 7pm
Music: Christian Alan Hansen 1pm to 4pm

June 9
Food: Double R BBQ 12pm to 4pm
Music: Jason Benefield 1pm to 4pm

June 16 - Father’s Day
Food: Taco Madre 12pm to 4pm
Music: Kristin Rose Kelly 1pm to 4pm

June 23
Food: Fernando’s Street Kitchen 12pm to 4pm
Music: Syahi 1pm to 4pm

June 30
Food: The Pasta Box 12pm to 4pm
Music: John Blomquist 1pm to 4pm

July 7
Food: Stadium Street Eats 12pm - 8pm
Music: Cheryl Rodey 1pm to 4pm

July 14
Food: The Pasta Box 12pm to 4pm
Music: John Till 1pm to 4pm

July 21
Food: Fernando’s Street Kitchen 12pm to 4pm
Music: New Vintage Streets 1p to 4pm

July 28
Food: Kori’s Koop Chicken Food Truck
Music: Nicole Devine 1pm to 3pm

August 4
Food: Waffadilla 12 to 7pm
Music: Noah Gabriel 1pm to 4pm

August 11
Food: The Pasta Box 12pm to 4pm
Music: Jason Benefield & Friends 1pm to 4pm

August 18
Food: The Dirty Bird Chicken Truck 12pm to 4pm
Music: Matt Petkovich

August 25
Food: Chuck’s Wood Fired Pizza 12 to 4pm
Music: Matt Keen 1pm to 4pm

September 1
Food: Fernando’s Street Kitchen 12pm to 4pm
Music: Justin Moyar 1pm to 4pm

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      

February Saturday Bluegrass Series

This winter, we’re kickin’ it at our St. Charles brewery with live bluegrass every single Saturday night all through the cold month of February! Join us for our Saturday Bluegrass Series with live bluegrass and a different food vendor each week (some dates TBD and weather pending).

THE LINEUP:

2/3: the Lucky Pickers

2/10: the Woolly Buggers

2/17: 65 North Pickers

2/24: the Rusken Brothers Band

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

Riverlands to Release New Cocktail-Inspired Series of Beers

PRESS RELEASE

Contact: Jeremy Teel

Phone: 630-549-6293

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

11/20/2023

RIVERLANDS BREWING COMPANY CREATES NEW LINE OF COCKTAIL-INSPIRED ALES TO TAP INTO SPIRIT MARKET

ST. CHARLES, Nov. 20 – Riverlands Brewing Company, a small craft brewery that calls St. Charles, Illinois, its home, recently announced a new line of fruited sour ales that take aim at the growing Ready-To-Drink (RTD) and spirits markets and are set to release at their taproom on Friday, December 8.

The new series of beers, Cocktail Hour, features highly recognizable flavors most commonly found in popular cocktails, specifically of the tiki or tropical persuasion. Technically fruited sour ales, these beers use real fruit puree and 100% natural ingredients and extracts to recreate a wide array of famous cocktails.

The first entry in the series is Cocktail Hour: Painkiller. After souring the beer in the kettle and fermenting the sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide, real pineapple, orange, and cream of coconut are added to recreate its tropical, rum-based counterpart.

Served at the taproom in a specialty Tiki glass, a slice of dehydrated pineapple, and nutmeg garnish, Cocktail Hour: Painkiller will appeal to anyone who normally chooses fruitier, tropical beverages over lagers or IPAs.

“One of the things we’ve always felt strongly about is that beer can be for everybody,” says Eric Bramwell, head brewer and co-founder of the brewery. “Many folks think of beer as just one thing that they don’t like. But there’s so much variety out there now. This series expands on that by tying flavors back to cocktails people are already familiar with.”

Cocktail Hour: Painkiller will make its debut on the Riverlands tap list and in four packs of 16 ounce cans to-go on Friday, December 8. Two other versions, Cocktail Hour: Mai Tai and Cocktail Hour: Tiki Whiskey Sour, will be on tap while pours last as well, and Fernando’s Street Kitchen will be serving Hawaiian-inspired food from 5pm to 8pm to help celebrate the release.

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Oktoberfest: What's the Difference Between Märzen and Festbier?

Guten Tag!  Today's Brewer's Corner is distinctly German focused as this is the most wonderful time of the year in the lager world: Oktoberfest! 

We've got our own Oktoberfest Kickoff Party tomorrow, September 16th, at our St. Charles brewery and this year we brewed a special beer for it: our Fox Fest Festbier. 

What's a festbier you ask?  How is that different from the normal Oktoberfest beer I've been drinking since I cracked open an amber colored, caramelly Sam Adams Octoberfest for the first time?  What’s the difference between Märzen and Festbier? Well, I'll tell you.  

I'm not going to go into detail about THE Oktoberfest itself here, though it's a really interesting history that started with a wedding.  If you want, read up on it here: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oktoberfest

In my early craft beer years, I was an Oktoberfest beer fanatic.  Trips to the Bavarian Lodge in Lisle during this time of year carried the same excitement as a kid on Christmas morning.  I loved all the copper colored, malty lagers I could get my hands on. 

The thing I found interesting though when I looked at pictures of Oktoberfest in Munich was that the beer people were drinking didn't look like any Oktoberfest Märzen I was familiar with, it looked more like a golden pale lager.  

Finally, I got to go to Munich in 2010 and experience the Munich Oktoberfest first hand.  The moment I had my first liter of Spaten Oktoberfestbier placed in front of me and took a big sip, I was hooked on Festbier.  Several more liters (too many, I became what they refer to as a "beer corpse") followed as this new-to-me style was immensely drinkable, but still packed a bit of ABV punch.

Sometime after pale lager became the most popular beer style in the world, the beer served at Munich's Oktoberfest transitioned from the more traditional copper/amber Märzen style into the paler Festbier in the interest of drinkabilty, and thus I'm sure, increased beer sales.  Most of you are probably familiar with a Märzen style Oktoberfest beer.  Think notes of slightly toasted bread crust, fresh baked biscuits, and maybe a little caramel while hopefully not ever really tasting sweet. 

The lesser known style outside of the Oktoberfest itself is the Festbier.  This beer is almost like a Munich Helles after it's been hitting the weights.  Everything is amped up, but not into Maibock territory.  Festbier is stronger, maltier, and hoppier than Helles, but never loses that balance and always retains its drinkability.  

So, in celebration of this Tale of Two Oktoberfests, we bring you two seasonal lagers to be celebrated this weekend.  Though both have been on our tap list for a bit, our party is their time to shine.  Scarecrows in Lederhosen, our fall staple since our first year, returns, but no longer tiptoeing the line between the styles.  We committed to the Märzen style Oktoberfest this year with Scarecrows, featuring a heavier emphasis on its malt character. 

We also, for the first time, are serving up Fox Fest German-Style Festbier, our attempt to bring the beer consumed on the Theresienwiese in Munich home to you! 

Enjoy a liter of each this Saturday with me during our Oktoberfest in St. Charles. I'll be walking around in my Lederhosen, hopefully looking in better shape than this picture of me on Oktoberfest day one in Munich over a decade ago. 

- Eric Bramwell,
Co-Founder & Head Brewer
Riverland Brewing Company