Larry Chase of Granite City Food & Brewery emailed to let me know that one of their best-selling seasonals, their Oktoberfest, goes on tap as of October 8th. Here’s the breakdown of the beer from Larry:

Ingredients include:

Grain Cargill GC Special Blend, Munich, Vienna, Crystal
Hops Northern Brewer, Tettnang, Sterling
O.G. 1.055

Apparently this beer sells out within 2 weeks of it being tapped, so if you’re a fan of Oktoberfests make sure to get over to GCFB ASAP.

Larry Chase is the Worthouse/Brewery Manager for , a new local Brewpub located in Creve Coeur. Larry was kind enough to answer some of my questions about how they brew their beer, how the ferment it and what some of his favorite styles are. (You can read my initial thoughts of GCFB here.)

STL Hops: How many styles does GC produce in a year?
Larry Chase: GC serves 4 regular house beers: Northern Light Lager (pale lager), Brother Benedict’s Bock (bock), Duke of Wellington IPA (IPA), and Broad Axe Stout (dry Irish stout). We also brew 6 seasonal beers. The current line-up includes Burning Barn Irish Red Ale, Ostara’s Spring Ale, Wag’s Wheat (Hefeweizen), Belgian White Ale, Oktoberfest, and McK’s Scottish Ale. All locations have one 350 gal batch of the seasonal to serve.

STL Hops: How much room for experimentation do the brewers have?
LC: Our head brewers experiment with recipe improvement through process controls and lab testing. Certain seasonal beers are sometimes tweaked on a year to year basis to improve flavor. Experimentation for developing new beers is limited given that the current seasonal rotation is set in place.

STL Hops: Can you quickly explain how the Fermentus Interruptus process works?
LC: Granite City’s business model for beer production is designed for flavor consistency and attractive financial leverage across a multi-unit restaurant concept. We are a restaurant with a microbrewery. A centralized brewery for wort production gives us the opportunity to consistently control the flavor inputs of the brewing cycle. We also remove from the restaurants both the capital cost of brewing equipment and the square footage cost of a manufacturing facility.

We then ship the wort in a customized tank truck to each location. After off-loading into fermenters we pitch yeast and finish the production cycle through fermentation, maturation, and filtering.

Shipping wort instead of finished beer allows us to avoid the complex legal hurdles of shipping alcohol across state lines.

STL Hops: How does the wort arrive at the stores?
LC: The wort is shipped in a straight tanker truck. Our trucks have a series of 4 or 6 individual pods (all insulated) at 400 gal each. This set-up lets us ship multiple styles of beer to multiple locations in one trip. We use hoses and a pump at each restaurant to transfer the beer from the truck into the fermenters.

STL Hops: How do you avoid problems like contamination?
LC: We follow standard cleaning, sanitizing, and testing procedures like all breweries. We simply pay attention to the extra step of wort shipping. The wort is chilled to 40oF and stored in a 37oF cooler prior to shipment. Like all breweries we have the constant challenge of maintaining clean and sanitary conditions.

We have a lab at the central worthouse for on-going sample testing.

Every brewery manager is trained and follows a set of SOP’s for the brewery operations at each restaurant. Our brewery field manager, trained in brewing science, oversees the work of all brewery managers.

STL Hops: How do you deal with things like aging with the limited capacity at each store?
LC: We serve 2 ales and 2 lagers as part of our regular beer line-up. We have enough tank space (5 fermenters, 8 cellar vessels) to ensure our required maturation time for each of the beers. Through our volume and usage reporting system we are able to schedule deliveries to ensure each location has wort on a just-in-time basis.

Running out tends to be only an issue when we experience mechanical failures with equipment at the restaurants. That’s no different from any other brewpub.

We only serve one batch of each seasonal. This increases the demand and the urgency for customers to come try the beer before it is gone.

STL Hops: What’s your favorite style of beer right now?
LC: I lean towards hop flavored and bitter beers. The bigger winter seasonal beers are always fun to drink during this colder time of year.

Thank you again Larry for providing STL Hops readers with a little more information on how your process works.

“Welcome to GC!” the friendly hostess said as I walked into the Granite City Food and Brewery located on Olive in Creve Coeur. “GC?” I thought to myself. But it soon became clear that this was an attempt to not confuse us locals with the other GC, Granite City, Illinois, which this new GC has nothing to do with.

Created at the end of the microbeer bubble, Granite City Food and Brewery started in St. Cloud, Minnesota and has gradually expanded its presence across the Midwest. The more interesting thing about GC is that they don’t actually do any brewing on-site at the satellite locations, it’s all done at a central brewhouse and then the cooled wort is shipped to each location where it is infused with yeast and fermentation is the allowed to occur. It’s a patented process they call Fermentus Interruptus.

So how’s the beer? Unfortunately I only had the chance to try one, the IPA. When the server came over to ask what I thought about it, I answered, “It’s ok.” My dining companion started sheepishly laughing as this was not the answer the server was looking for. But I was just being honest. It wasn’t bad by any means, but it’s wasn’t great either. It had a nice hop aroma and a subtle bitterness. It’ll be very palatable to those that have never had an IPA before. But for some of us, it may be a bit lacking.

GC locally carries four beers, Pale Lager, Dopplebock, IPA and an Traditional Stout. The offer a five pull sampler which includes the four listed above and a mixture of the dopple and the lager as the fifth sample. I was very impressed with the beer menus as they offer up a great amount of detail about the beer. From the grain bill and hop selections to the OG and ABV range. It provides plenty of information for those who may know nothing about beer to us beer nerds that really enjoy knowing what the OG of a beer is. The only other thing I’d love to see included would be the addition of knowing how many IBUs are in the beer. I think if they explained IBUs to their customers it would help the customers learn what they like and what to avoid.

Overall it was a pleasant experience and I know I’ll be back to try their full sampling. But I’ll be honest when I say I’m a bit concerned about the future of the restaurant. Let’s not kid ourselves, St. Louis is an AB drinking town. While I think that St. Louisans will go to a brewpub on occasion for the novelty factor, I think for the most part they’re not interested in going to a place where they can’t get their Budweiser. Then again, there are plenty of brewpubs in the area that prove me wrong, I hope GC can do the same.

Correction, it was a Bock and not a Dopplebock as I mentioned before. Hazy memory.

Granite City Brewery Opens on January 15

Larry Chase, the Brewery manager for Granite City Food and Brewery, informed me that their newest location, which is in Creve Couer, will be opening tomorrow. GCFB has a very unusual method of brewing beer, which Bill Burge touched briefly on a while back. Larry has kindly accepted an offer for a interview in the near future, so if you have anything you’d like me to ask him feel free to leave a comment or post it in the forums.

Scottish Arms Owner Opening New Restaurant

Thanks to Jim for point this one out to me from Sauce’s Scoop. Alistair Nisbet, the owner of the Scottish Arms, will be opening a new restaurant in the Tower Grove area named The Shaved Duck. Besides having what sounds like the most delicious name ever, the Shaved Duck will feature only American craft beers. It will be interesting to see what kind of list they put together, we’ll find out when the restaurant opens in March.

Buffalo Brewing Company Updates

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago about the newest brewpub entering the St. Louis area, the Buffalo Brewing Company. Dave from O’Fallon Brewery has informed us that he’ll be brewing part time for the new brewery and that 2-4 beer wills be on tap when the pub opens in a couple of weeks. A total of 6 beers will be on draught when they get fully up and operational, 4 flagships and 2 seasonals. From Dave, “The proposed beers to start are, Am. Brown Ale, Chili beer, Amber Ale, Golden Ale, Rye IPA, and Bavarian Hefeweisen.”