»July 23rd, 2010 by joe mohrfeld


Our Woodcut #4 Oak Aged Lager provides a toasted oak nose filled with dried apricot, pineapple and raisin along with a warming vanilla character in the finish. Woodcut #4 provides an exceptional base for showcasing the importance of hand selected, hand coopered, medium toast, American virgin oak barrels. By choosing a double Marzen style lager, we as brewers were able to develop a beer that showcases the caramel malty characters of a Marzen, along with the clean warming alcohol character only an 11% lager can provide. The nose of this beer is rich in complexity, providing pineapple, dried apricot, raisin and a pleasantly soft muskiness. Toasted oak overtones balance these aromas with a light cedar quality. As the warming alcohol coats the palate a soft vanilla lingers on the tongue imparted by the medium toast virgin American oak. As this lager warms in the glass, notes of caramel, raisin, brown sugar and a not-so-sweet plum emerge. By aging this beer in American virgin oak barrels at both barrel room temperatures and lagering temperatures, we were able to extract the intricacies of the oak along with the cleanness of a well-brewed lager. Woodcut #4 pours a brilliant maroon with a rich white head and prominent lacing.

For those of you living up in the north country, in the land of 10,000 lakes, we recommend pairing this complex beer with your freshly caught Walleye, lightly seasoned and grilled with bell peppers, caramelized onion and mushroom, lakefront el fresca style, with your favorite friends and family…or just nice people who love great hand crafted beer, good food, and listening to you re-tell how you caught that evenings Walleye again and again and again. And if you want to send some Walleye our way now that we are sending our Woodcut #4 your way, we wouldn’t mind!

Cheers!




»December 3rd, 2009 by joe mohrfeld


It is exactly why we pilot brew, because sometimes the best laid plans do not always result in what you thought… and because experimentation is a lot of fun! We wrote a recipe for the first pilot brew for our Odell Brewing Co. Strong Belgian Golden that involved a number of ingredients and techniques we personally had little experience with. We were rewarded with a beer much different from beer we “brewed on paper”, but very inspiring to the end goal of the project. Being adventurous and rethinking what has been traditionally accepted about brewing is the reason craft brewers are always progressing while developing new beer styles, brewing techniques, and brewery equipment. Pilot brewing can produce unexpected and delicious results, even if it was not quite what we set out to do!


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»November 30th, 2009 by joe mohrfeld


A meal with friends…

Craft cooking works much like craft brewing, we do not follow a lot of the prescribed rules for style, and pilot batches are really helpful in working out the nuances before serving it up to friends. For our pairing with Woodcut No.3 Oak Aged Crimson Ale, Krystal and I wanted to do something completely different from anything we have ever cooked before, or anything we have ever thought of pairing our beer with before. This approach did require a few ‘pilot batches’ in the nights preceding our meal, but ultimately ended in a delicious 3 course pairing we were able to share with our friends Brendan, Odell Brewing Co’s Production Manager, and his wife Katie, New Belgium Brewing Co’s Quality Control Extraordinaire…

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»November 24th, 2009 by joe mohrfeld


The Single Serve 750ml Series has been fun for us brewers at OBC. Over the past year we have been able to design, develop and brew 5 entirely new beers for 2009. We have also been working on, or have already brewed, numerous beers for release in 2010. We are really excited about developing these new beers and we wanted to let you, the lover of hand-crafted beers, in on the process we go through in developing beers we are excited enough about to serve up to our friends. You can follow our brewers on this Blog as we work on creating and brewing a Strong Belgian Golden for release in a caged and corked 750ml bottle in 2010; from the very first email that started the project, through the various pilot batches, and concluding with the release party in our tasting room.


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»November 16th, 2009 by Joni


All of our 750 ml corked and caged bottle beers are 100% bottle conditioned. This means we add fresh, active yeast to the bottles along with some unfermented sugars to allow the beers to go through a secondary fermentation within the bottle. The beer is flat when bottled and over a period of several weeks the yeast ferments the sugars producing carbon dioxide within the bottle, giving the finished beer it.