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

Brewer's Corner: Get Ready for Your Barrel Aged Summer

Some things are worth the wait. With this edition of our Brewer's Corner, I want to talk to you about our barrel program, and what's coming down the pipeline this summer and beyond.

Since we opened in 2019, every time we brewed an imperial stout, we would fill and stash away a couple of bourbon barrels out of each batch. Two barrels here, two barrels there, over the course of that first year. SLOWLY, we began to build our stock up, but our first few releases were small by necessity.

As we got a better handle on our production schedule, we started putting a couple of full batches of stout into barrels to build supply further. During the pandemic shutdown, we took some of that dreary down time to further build up our supply of barrels. Now, we were able to do a few more releases, adding a third, sometimes even a fourth barrel per release, getting more beer into more people's hands. We even got some fun collaborations with some of our favorite brewers into barrels for future releases.

As time went on, we were able to tailor unique stout recipes specifically designed to stand up to the barrel aging process, such as the base for our non-adjunct stout, Tranquil. We were able to source barrels that are unique and from highly respected distilleries, and we've got a few that we're particularly excited about. As of this writing, we have over 80 barrels filled with stout, porter, a gose, and an experimental Acid Rainbow in a red wine barrel that we threw a ton of wild yeast into. 80 barrels will seem like small potatoes to some, a ton to others, but for us, we worked hard to carefully build and manage that supply.

That brings us to our Barrel Aged Summer, which may actually turn into a Barrel Aged Year. The fruits of our labor over the past year and a half are now beginning to pay off and we have a whole bunch of barrels that are ready to be pulled, packaged, and drunk. Over the course of the coming months, we plan to release a new barrel aged beer every month, possibly even more than one. Some barrel aged versions of some of your favorite stouts over the past year will see the light of day, including some pretty exciting collabs, and we'll have a few new ones too. We've been able to let these beers sit in the barrel for the proper amount of time, some being a year, others up to 18 months. Patience is the key when building these programs, and while that's not always easy, it pays off.

Barrel Aged Ice Cream Carton

Our first release of your Barrel Aged Summer: a Neapolitan Stout brewed with cacao nibs, strawberry, and vanilla, aged in hand selected Wild Turkey bourbon barrels.

The first release of our Barrel Aged Summer is Barrel Aged Ice Cream Carton. When we pulled the beer out of the Wild Turkey Bourbon barrels, our first thought was bourbon infused fudge. We're adding cocoa nibs to this beer, but it almost didn't need to. In addition to the nibs, big doses of strawberry and vanilla round out this Neapolitan Stout. We feel like the barrel aging treatment is a big improvement to what was already a delicious stout.

This release will happen IN-PERSON at our brewery in St. Charles, Illinois, at noon, Saturday, May 28. We’ve been longing to return to in-person, out-the-back bottle releases for quite some time. Join us, grab your bottles, and hit the taproom afterwards to try this and 15 other beers on tap.

Keep tabs on our social media for more info on additional Barrel Aged Summer (and then some) releases. There's going to be some fun stuff rolling out, and we can’t wait to share it with all of you: guests, friends, and collaborators.

- Eric Bramwell, Head Brewer and Co-Founder, Riverlands Brewing Company

Brewer's Corner: A Return to Drinkability

Hi River Rascals! I’ve been meaning to do more of these posts as I unfortunately don’t get to spend as much time out in the taproom talking to people as I’d like, so these are a nice way to talk beer, Riverlands beer specifically. The topic of this round of “The Brewer’s Corner” is the Return to Drinkability. This is a topic that’s been on our mind at Riverlands for quite some time, and it’s begun to inform our approach to almost every beer we make with a few exceptions (looking at you, Imperial Stouts and Pastry Power sour).

Nowhere is this approach more apparent than our lagers. Last time I did a post like this, it was to go into detail about how we’ve revamped our lager program and since then, we’ve gone deep into the lager well. Nothing beats the drinkability of a well-constructed pale lager like a Pilsner or Helles. Using the same love and craftsmanship we poured into those beers to make them complex yet supremely drinkable, we took a hard look at our other great love, our Hazy IPA’s.

This style is really at the heart of our Return to Drinkability initiative. A handful of years ago, the New England Style IPA took the Chicagoland area by storm. The full-bodied smooth mouthfeel, the residual sweetness, the low bitterness and high hop flavors appealed to our senses, and we fully embraced the haze craze. As we’ve done with many other styles, we Chicago area brewers put our own stamp on the style, and our hazies pushed the envelope in body and mouthfeel. This is achieved through many hallmarks of brewing the style, like water chemistry and a high protein malt grain bill, but also through residual sugar. Unfermented sugar leaves a beer with more body, and this can be enhanced with brewing sugars like maltodextrin and lactose. Chicago-area hazy IPA became heavier, fuller, and different than its coastal cousins.

This brings me back to the Return to Drinkability. As our Assistant Brewer, Nick, and I were each drinking a pint of one of our hazy doubles, we both remarked how difficult it was to drink these beers by the pint. Nick had been saying how he had wanted to brew a drier version of one of our hazies, inspired by his love of a particularly well-known West Coast haze maker. I had been hesitant to do so, but upon being tired of our beer’s heaviness while trying to finish a pint, I said let’s do it. Our beer Coastal Daze was born from this idea, but that approach quickly began to influence our other hazies too. Nick trades beer, and I’ve been lucky enough to try beers from across the country that many consider to be the best hazy IPA’s around. I’ve also made my obligatory beer pilgrimage out to New England to try the OGs of the style straight from the source. Aside from the obvious hop saturation and mouthfeel wizardry the best seem to have dialed in, they all shared the quality of being amazingly drinkable even as the ABV increased. Surprised was an understatement when I drank a Triple IPA from one of these breweries and thought it seemed almost refreshing, drinking more like single IPA’s I was seeing back home.

Slowly over the course of the past six months or so, we’ve altered our approach to these beers. We’ve slowly began trying to dry them out, decreasing the level of sweetness and trying not to rely on sugar to create the creamy mouthfeel we all love. In the coming weeks, we’ll be releasing some of our returning favorites, as well as some new haze, and all will be brewed with the idea that, even in a double IPA, drinkability is king. You should want to order another pint upon finishing the glass of hop juice in your hand. I get that sugar is delicious. We’re biologically wired to love it, but these were never meant to be decadent beers. A hazy IPA should be a beer you can enjoy while sitting with your friends having a beer or two and not feel like you just had a cheeseburger.

“So, what’s changed?” you may be asking yourself. To start, lower finishing gravity, which means less residual sugar left in the beer. We want a lot of that perceived juiciness to come from the flavor of the expensive hops we used in large quantities, not just sugar levels. When we throw a ton of Citra in a beer, we want that to be what hits you hardest. Next, we simplified some steps in both process and recipe to bring you a lighter colored beer to be a better canvas for those hops to play on, and less to get in the way of wanting to take another sip. We’ve also been carbonating these beers slightly higher to help these flavors dance across your tongue, keeping things bright and lively.

In closing, we want to brew the beer we want to drink, and we want to drink IPA’s that we can have more than one of in a sitting. We’ve always looked for ways to put our own stamp on everything we do, whether its in our recipe our process. We’ve adjusted both here to bring you our take on what we really think these beers should be. With the release of our Anniversary triple IPA, our double IPA Neon River, and our IPA Dean Street all coming this week and next, we hope you all will enjoy the approach we took as much as we have.

Eric Bramwell
Head Brewer/Co-Owner
Riverlands Brewing Company