Tanks Are In, Electrical Installed, Circuits Blown

We crawled our youthful selves down to the shop yesterday to install our brewhouse.  Or begin installing it.  Me, Matty, Jason, Jason Kowalewski and Rob schlupped the cauldrons into our dank subterranean birthing canal.

They look downright lovely.  The stuff nerd dreams are made of.

Once they were in and we had a decent flow worked out, we plugged in our 4 electrical elements (we picked them up from brewmation.com and comfortgurus.com) and filled her full of that deliciously balanced great lakes water.

It was a lovely site to be sure.  1 element came on-line.  2 elements.  3 elements.  All 4 elements were on-line and cranking that water up.  It was so lovely it almost sobered me up.

And then around minute 33 we blew a breaker... somewhere.  Not in our demon-haunted section of the building but... somewhere.

Jason and I are heading back over to investigate and spill some cat blood should Pazuzu demand it in exchange for proper working conditions.  All Hail Pazuzu, dark underwriter of Sumerian power issues.

Mash Tun Is Built

I was informed this morning by Chief Operating Gorilla of IBW Jason Monk that our Mash Tun is done.  

At some point we're going to do a more technical investigation on our handmade brewery, but for the time being all you need to know is that we sourced the tanks from a Mormon sex and drugs cult in Louisiana and then added on the manway and ferrules from parts we got at Glacier Tanks.

Of course, you may look upon her lasciviously.

We're installing the brewhouse on Saturday!

Updates On Licensing, Build Out & Upcoming Pours

First, may I suggest some decent music for our little sit down?  How about Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats?

Perfect. Now go get yourself a drink.  I've been putting a lot of Willet Pot Still in my face as of late. Why not treat yourself with the same compassion? You're really not as bad as you think you are. I wouldn't lie.

First order of business:  Jason is a fucking bad ass.  

The two of us went down to our dingy lab and took a 16lb sledge hammer to 150 years of creepy floor.

And we made right every wrong that thing had ever done to us.

Now, we have a floor drain!  And 4x 220v outlets to fuel our 10bbl electric kettle that Jason built from stainless he bartered off a voodoo sex cult he used to run with in Haiti.  

And we've got a federal license.

And our Illinois license... almost.  We're in the final stretches of that bit of the narrative, but we did at least get our first rejection letter from this great Land of Lincoln!  Under the guidance of the ILCC we resubmitted our application and will hopefully be legally paying excise tax by the end of the month.  And, of course, pouring beer made in our subterranean lair.

I've been spending long, strange, often-times confusing hours with our illustrious designer Markus Ludeman driving down the mysteries that will be our bottle designs.  Knob turner to the stars, Mark has been doing an amazing job slapping down my crummy ideas and building up great ideas from the quivering shards of what is left.  I'm not going to give to much away, but...

So yeah.  The long story made short:  We should be producing kegs at our space by mid-August and bottles by Mid-September.  Fuck. Yes.

And speaking of mid-September, put Saturday September 20th on your calendar.  We're hosting a FREE - yes FREE - party at our outdoor space to help celebrate our license acquisition as we double-dip-dive into the illustrious abyss of booze and commerce.  There will be live music, burlesque dancers, FIRE!, and of course collaborations with some of Chicago's best brewers.  Seriously, don't fuck this up, make sure you make it to the party. 

 If you haven't seen it yet, this is our dope outdoor space:

Oh! And we'll have some brilliant merchandise for you to buy buy buy very soon.

So yeah, hot shit. Things are popping all over.  

We love you all.  Each of you.  Like our own foul-mouthed children.  And we want to intoxicate you.  We want to fill your minds and your bellies with electric slurry dreams.  We want to elevate you to the noisiest fucking plateaus of pleasure and then keep going.  We're getting there.  We're bringing you.  We can all slap high fives together.  I'd kiss you, but I don't want to make this weird.

There's some stuff going on the next couple weeks.  If you want to catch up with us, check out the events down yonder.  We're also rolling out the Orange Sunshine to some bars again, stay tuned to the Facefuck page to stay abreast of that.  We are legion.  We will endure.

This weekend we're at 2 events:

• Saturday July 26th we'll have Orange Sunshine pouring at the 2nd Annual Maguire University Burger Bash (http://maguireuniversity.com/burger-bash-2-saturday-july-26th/).  This is a great event raising money for a great cause, the Wounded Warrior Project.  Come out and try a bunch of burgers, drink too much Orange Sunshine and raise some money to build homes for our Veterans.  
• Saturday July 27th we'll have ye olde Orange Sunshine at the Sierra Nevada Beer Camp Across America, 100+ brewers pouring beer to eradicate any rogue brain cells that may be carrying bad, anti-humanist vibrations.

Next weekend we're pouring at Goose Island Wrigleyville's Anniversary party which is also a fundraiser.  Proceeds will benefit Gordon Biersch and former Goose Island brewer John Wykiewicz’s now six year old son who was diagnosed in May 2013 with a golf-ball sized medulloblastoma, which is a highly malignant form of childhood brain cancer.   Come out between 5p - 10pm and help offset some of the medical costs the Wykiewicz's have had to endure.

Lastly, on August 21st we'll be pouring at Fischman's Tap This #6.  From 6p - 1a 16 Local Breweries will be pouring.  There will be live music and food trucks.  Come on out and say hi and get some of the last Orange Sunshine of the season.

Godspeed, friends. It is all ON. We will knock glasses again very soon!  Don't take any guff from those swine.
 
Brian, Jason, Matt, Willie

Craft Beer Week Scheduling So Far...

We're getting our schedule squared away for Craft Beer Week, things are getting exciting.  Here's what we've got so far and we'll update as a few other things get confirmed.  

We're also in the process of selling off our delicious American Citrus Saison, Orange Sunshine.  Kegs get delivered mid-week this week, I'll post an update with our locations once they go out.  Good times.

If you've got some other events that you want us for just shoot us an email at info@ibw-chicago.com

Saturday May 17th - Lagunita's Beer Circus (Sold Out)

Sunday May 18th - Lagunita's Beer Circus

Tuesday May 20th - TBD Event at Local Option

Wednesday May 21st  - Andersonville Brewing's New Brewer Showcase

More to come....

IBW All Up in the Chiditarod

If you don't know already, Illuminated Brew Works established a very exciting partnership with our friends at the Chiditarod this year, creating and providing a beer exclusively for the race. We will be pouring IBW's ChiditaRye French Rye Saison at the starting line, all the checkpoints and at the finish line this weekend. 

When the Chiditarod organizers approached us about this, we knew immediately we wanted to be involved with this great charity.  We also knew we wanted to execute this beverage expertly so we teamed up with our friends over at Une Annee brewery.  Une Annee is, hands down, the most interesting brewery working in Chicago today.  The beers they make are simple and clean deliveries of flavor and nuance that's bringing a much needed and new voice to the Chicago beer scene, raising the bar to a exciting new level.  It was a real joy working with Dustin and Jerry on the ChiditaRye.
 
ChiditaRye is a pretty lovely, very dry French Rye Saison.  The earthy yeast and spicy rye are delivered over a delicate touch of American hoppiness in a beer built to last longer than you on race day.  It pairs quite well with sabotage.

If you want to try this great collaboration you need to act pretty fast.  It will only be available at the starting line of the event and at the following checkpoints: Roots Pizza, 5 Star, Lotties, Bucktown Pub, Emporium Arcade and a few more to be announced. 

Lukas Satas, who made that great wood-cut sign for us that you probably saw on shitbook is making our tap handles for the ChiditaRye as well.  Make sure to ogle those pretty things from a near distance when you indulge your faces in our beer this weekend. Check back on our site at www.ibw-chicago.com for more locations.
 
Hey speaking of the website we’re in the middle of a huge overhaul of that bad boy.  We’ve been working with Mark Ludeman to design something worthy.  It’s a work in progress right now.  Check it out and let us know what you think. www.ibw-chicago.com  Mark is also working on a new logo for us, you probably saw at least the first pass of it up yonder at the top of this email.
 
We picked up our first 5BBL fermenter from PBST Tanks a few weeks ago.  We’re all real proud of Vern, our little stainless beast. We’ve also put some more money we don’t have into a glycol chiller for the double-jacketing on the FV and as well as some cooperage.  It appears that this thing is actually happening, good people of the internets. We are slowly becoming a brewery.

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And, you know, one pretty vital part of becoming a brewery is the licensing needed to properly sell your wares.  We’ve made some real progress on that as well, moving to what appears to be the third tear of the federal licensing.  We are hoping – and think it’s realistic – that we’ll be able to self-distribute beer produced at our very own dungeon by July or August at the latest.  Pretty exciting stuff.
 
Oh hey... one other thing about the Chiditarod... Apparently America’s favorite son, Jimmy Fallon, is in town this weekend.  Liz from Chiditarod has started a social media campaign to get Jimmy to the Chiditarod.  We think that ideas as good as putting wheels on peanut butter.  All you have to do to help sway his interest is tweet him at @JimmyFallon and give him one good reason to come. What could be a better reason than for him to get mind-crawled by some fucking IBW beer?
 
Oh yeah, we just got a shitload of stickers in, both ChiditaRye stickers as well as IBW stickers.  Find us and acquire them for your strange toys.  We also have glasses and a very few shirts left.  We’ll get those on the site soon or you can just email me at brian@ibw-chicago.com if you want.
 
Why don’t you like us on poopbook?
 
Lastly…. Our glasses are raised and our hearts are heavy in honor of the passing of Harold Ramis.  He was truly one of the greats.  But hey, in seemingly terrible times like these, we like to stare a little longer at the sun and vaguely remember what it says on the side of the Ba’hai temple in the northern suburbs: “I have sent death as a messenger of Joy to thee, wherefore dost though weep”.  Wherefore indeed, hot shot.
 
Godspeed, friends.  We will knock glasses again soon.