As brewers, most of our brewing starts off early in the morning. Which means we like to drink coffee to get our day started. So naturally we enjoy a hand crafted coffee beer. Last year we brewed four different kinds of coffee stouts using coffee beans from The Spice Merchant. The first coffee bean we used was chocolate mintcicle, which added a nice minty note to the coffee flavor. Then we used a coffee cake bean that added some sweet cinnamon notes to the beer. Our third coffee bean is a fun one to say, organic bali kintamani. This organic coffee bean added a rich coffee flavor to the stout poured on nitro. Our fourth bean that we used was papua new guinea peaberry. The owner of The Spice Merchant helped us pick this rare bean.

We are getting set to brew some more rich imperial coffee stouts, but we want your help. We want help picking out the coffee beans, being on our tasting panel to pick the best bean, and adding the coffee beans in the boil kettle! We need two people to come with us to The Spice Merchant and help us pick out five different coffee beans for testing. Then we need five people to sit on our tasting panel and find the perfect bean. We will steep the coffee into one of our beers and see which coffee flavor and aroma will be best. Then we want one person to help us add the coffee to the boil kettle the day we brew it.

If you would like to help us with our next coffee stout, just comment on the WBC facebook page that this link is shared on. Just comment on which part you would like to help at. We will also pick someone for our #wbcEPICxmas giveaway. Up for grabs is a women’s light blue zip up hoodie. We don’t have any hard dates on when this will take place, so please be flexible with us as we try and pin point some dates. More than likely we will pick coffee beans over the lunch hour. Then do the tasting panel after work around 6 or so. Then the day the beer is brewed, the coffee addition will be around late morning.

Written by Kyle Banick and proofed by Jeremy Horn.

As a few of you may know, we are putting on a marathon/relay marathon in March. If someone would just wrap up the details on the on the registration website, we could start registration. #ThatGuyIsMe But anyways, this post is a little about our marathon and why we wanted to put on a race.

Since 1995, Boulevard and FreeState Brewing have been putting on a race to each others brewery. A fun run stretching over 40 miles and can have teams up to 10 run the course. WBC entered it’s first team of 10 in 2014. The idea is that everyone rides in a van together during the race and just drops off the runner for each leg. Then they will drive up to the next interchange and pick up that runner and drop off the next runner. This will happen until everyone has run their leg and you make it to the finish line and celebrate. Sounds simple and fun, right? Well, we tried making that simple process into a logistical nightmare. We somehow didn’t realize that if we all just get in a big vehicle and all ride together throughout the course it would be simple and fun. Each team can only have one car to drop off runners because of parking problems at the interchanges. So we put together this detailed plan on using two vehicles driving runners back and forth from our hotel in Lawrence. It was pure craziness and a massive headache coordinating the cars and runners. At the end of the day everyone ran their leg and we didn’t leave anyone behind. We celebrated our accomplishment of running the course but figured out that we weren’t very smart in our driving approach.

This year we had twenty people want to run on the WBC team for the brew to brew race. So we signed up two teams of ten to run. Being a little smarter than last year, we all met at FreeState in Lawrence and rented vans. FreeState was nice enough to let us park our cars at their production facility over night. We all piled in the two vans and drove to Kansas City for the night. We drove to Boulevard early in the morning and naturally had a beer to start the run. The first two legs of the run were a little challenging as it was during a cold thunderstorm. But rain or shine the race will go on. Luckily it cleared up after that and WBC team #1 dominated WBC team #2. We all met back at FreeState to enjoy some food and a couple well deserved beers.

We really enjoy doing adventurous things like this and want to bring that adventure to Wichita. So on March 13th, WBC, with help from GoRace Management and Timing, are putting on a certified marathon/relay marathon. The course will begin around WBC west and will stretch through Wichita and end at WBC east. If you’re a serious runner this will be a qualifying marathon. For the relay part, it will consist of teams of six. Each leg of the race will be slightly different lengths but you will want your strong runners at the beginning and the end. It will be $90 for a single runner and $40 per person on the teams of six. Each runner will get a participation medal and race shirt. Then after the race we will have a party at WBC east where each runner will get pizza and a couple of WBC beers. We will hand out awards for top 3 men and women, top team of men, top team of women, top 3 of coed teams, and best costume/team costumes. WBC is entering 3 teams to compete against each other, West, East, and Production. Production is the early favorite to take the crown.

Brew to Brew raises money for Cystic Fibrosis Foundation (CFF). We are donating money to Kansas Food Bank. http://www.kansasfoodbank.org/ is their website where they have plenty of programs that they run to help people in need.

A registration link right here would be amazing, but it will be done soon. Look for registration early next week. We will spell out some more details on that site as well. We are also going to be looking for some sponsorship and volunteers to help out with the race. If you’re interested in either of those please contact us at kbanick@wichitabrew.com or jhorn@wichitabrew.com.

Then up for grabs on our #wbcEPICxmas giveaway is a grey WBC hoodie! To be entered to win just tag a friend or friends on the Facebook page that this blog post is shared on that you would like to run with at the marathon.

Written by Kyle Banick and proofed by Jeremy Horn.

This blog post is going to center around what’s going on at our warehouse these days.

To get everyone up to speed, here is how we got to where we are today. We purchased a warehouse just south of downtown at 727 E. Osie. It’s an 18,000 sf brick building that was previously used to warehouse chemicals. This old brick building will now be the home to our 15 barrel brew house and 60 barrel fermenters. We purchased our brewing equipment from Tallgrass Brewing out of Manhattan, Kansas. We were pretty lucky to stumble across them wanting to sell their equipment. No Tallgrass didn’t go out of business, they upgraded to a new building and bigger brewing equipment.

The building we are in will fit our needs perfectly once we are done with construction. But, we have to get through construction first to get to the brewing. Since it was just a warehouse, it didn’t have much infastructure to house a brewery. So far we have busted out concrete to put in floor drains throughout the warehouse. Then the new concrete was sloped and an epoxy was applied. The water service has been upgraded and new water lines have been ran to various parts of the building. One big water upgrade was installing a RO system for our brewing water. This will allow us to control what kind of water we are using to brew. The gas serice has been upgraded to make room for our boiler. The boiler will push steam to the boil kettle to heat it. The electrical has been the biggest upgrade so far. The building only had a few outlets and lights, but we will need a dash more power. To get more power, we had to get a large transformer set next to our building. Now we will have electricity running everywhere to power all the equipment. A large cooler was built to store all our cans and kegs. We are in the process of installing all the glycol lines to the fermenters, brite tanks, and cold liquor tank. Ask Greg about them sometime, he would love to tell you all about them. The canning line just came in last week. We purchased a four head filler from Wild Goose out of Boulder, Colorado. A beautiful machine but they somehow missplled Wichita and put Witchita Brewing Company on the machine. As long as it fills cans with beer like a champ, that’s all that matters. We have also built a lab where we will be able to monitor yeast and check vital information. We have teamed up with the Wichita State University Biology department and will be getting an intern next semester to help with some of the lab duties.

The construction phase is close to winding down and we’re hopeful to be brewing before the end of the year. If that is the case we will be launching our beer into the Wichita market at the end of January! We are going to roll out with five brands to start with (WBC Wheat, V6, Valleyview Vanilla Porter, What Winter, Seal Team 6). And no that’s not a typo, WBC wheat is what we will have to call the half-wit wheat. Another brewery already has that name. We will have 12 and 16 ounce cans that will be sold at liquor stores. This is exciting and nervous times for us right now. We also haven’t forgot about the brewer for the day winners from last Christmas. We will be in touch with everyone once we get brewing down there.

Thanks for reading! Now the important stuff. Up for grabs today is 2 WBC coffee mugs. To be entered to win you must be tagged by someone from the Facebook post that this link is shared on. Winner will be picked at random and since it was posted late we will give you until 9 AM Monday morning. Hope they tag you back. Cheers!

Written by Kyle Banick and proofed by Jeremy Horn.