Mucho Rhizomes!!!!!

Just placed orders for another 100 rhizomes for Windy Hill, which will put us at 220 plants this year assuming they all make it!  We will now have Cascades, Nuggets, Willamettes, and Chinook.  These are certified organic, which should make our path to becoming certified a little faster.  We have also ordered enough malting barley to grow about a 1/3 acre to see how it does and see if we can figure a way to malt it.  Stay tuned for invitations to our threshing party in the summer.  If all goes well we can do a small batch estate ale in the fall.

Brew Shop Progress and Inventory

It seems slow, but things are happening on Windy Hill.  Once we can finalize the plans we will start construction on the brew shop and prepare for the grand opening.  We hope to be able to offer space for functions of the Southern Illinois Brewers club and the phenomenal turnout at the inaugural meeting  made us second guess our space requirements.  This is a good problem.  In any case we are making progress.  The image shown here is a mock up we put together showing the current and new buildings on the farm.  This has helped us visualizing the look and space we want to achieve.  We are trying to decided exactly how much space we really need for the brewshop by looking at various layouts.  (if any of you have experience in retail design let us know)

We are in the process of migrating our brewshop/store information to a website and the blog will become part of that website, but the address will stay the same.  In the meantime, we also have started building inventory and making sales of malt and yeast to accommodate local customers.  We will have hops for sale soon.   We will list what we have now to start serving people while we are building the shop.  In the near future we will have a more comprehensive offering.  We will have a price list posted soon, but if you want a price on something or to buy just let us know by email (windyhillhops@gmail.com).  Thanks for your wonderful support!

Base Malts
2-row rahr
2-row biess
Specialty Malts
Marris Otter
Rahr Pale ale malt
Victory
Rahr Pilsner
crystal 25L
briess crystal 40L
briess crystal 60L
crystal 85L
chocolate malt
black malt
Roasted Barley
Dakota Winter Rye

Yeast

Wyeast	1056
Wyeast	1275
Wyeast	1332
Wyeast	1388
Wyeast	1728
Wyeast	2112
Wyeast	2124
Wyeast	2278
Wyeast	3711
Wyeast	L5112

Wyeast Order

We will be placing an order for liquid yeast with Wyeast today.  We will sell them (Activator Packs) for $6.50. If you want to ensure that you get something in this order shoot me an email (windyhillhops@gmail.com) of what you want ASAP.  You can see the strains that have here http://www.wyeastlab.com/hb_yeaststrain.cfm

Health Department

Boy, that is an ominous title for a post when you are setting up a retail shop, isn't it?  Fortunately I am able to report that I had a very nice, productive and informative conversation with the Jackson County Health Department this morning about our operation and future retail brew shop.  It turns out that they see no need to inspect or regulate us as this time due to the non-food nature of what we are doing.  They had some helpful recommendations for the building that would put us in good position if either we want to deal with food at some point or the state regs change in a way that would impact us.  Nothing major and all were things that we were thinking anyway.

So watch out southern Illinois home brewers...there will soon be a spot to get your grain locally in what ever quantities you need.  We want to have a mill set up for use as well, so you can literally make up and crush your grain bill on the spot.