The Beer is First

While you may have noticed that we at Iron Horse Brewery take a pretty irreverent approach and put emphasis on many things that seemingly have nothing to do with beer, like the platypus, we’ve always been beer first.

It isn’t for the purpose of the sales pitch, but it sure makes a good one, that we have always focused on technologically exceeding our ranking on the brewery totem pole. When we were making 2,000 barrels a year, we were doing wort stability bags and cell counting with a haemacytometer. Did other breweries making that much beer do those things? Certainly some, but not many. Next we starting shipping our beers to a lab for color, alcohol, ibu and purity analysis. Were many other breweries making 4,000 barrels a year doing that? I highly doubt it, because the lab was a new entrant on the scene, which we embraced wholeheartedly.  Next we hired a brewer from the finest brewing school in the U.S., U.C. Davis. Yesterday this brewer, Tyson, informed me that our dissolved oxygen meter was up and running. Unabashed brag alert, we had a d.o. reading of 5.6 parts per billion in our bright tank. From what I understand, this is on par with the King of Beers.

We continue our pursuit of applying technology that is slightly beyond our reach with the introduction of the centrifuge in August.

This has been my position from day one. Perhaps I am a nerd for toys and technology. Ok, I have a fetish for stainless steel and commercial grade equipment of the finest manufacture. But, it is ultimately about making the best beer we can barely afford to make (and rocking the franklin at work).

Good beer matters to everyone because the health of our boutique industry is dependent on consistently good beer from all brewers, especially the small brewers who don’t have access to some of the sweet tools we have attained over the last 6 years. It is this reason that I want to offer access to our tools to any interested brewery. Want an audit done on your tank cleaning regimen? Call me, we will bring our Adenotriphosphate Bioluminescence meter over and check you out. We want craft beer to be the best it can be. Are you a brewer at a brewery much larger than Iron Horse? Step up and join the offering. Let’s elevate Washington beer.