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