Anchoring the end of Walnut, where it meets 16th Street and Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard, sits the Fitch soap company building. Like many structures around the western gateway, this building dates to the roaring twenties when industrial Des Moines was booming, but has sat empty for many decades. That is, until R.J. Tursi decided it was the perfect location to open his Exile Brewing Company.
Exile is cut from a slightly different cloth than Court Avenue or Raccoon River, Exile’s older siblings. While those well-established eateries have more of the traditional brewpub look, Exile meshes in modern design elements, though all three occupy rehabbed space. For more details as well as pictures of the dining areas, check out the coverage in the Reggie.
On the brewery side everything seems scaled to grow. A new four vessel 30 barrel Specific Mechanical brewhouse gives Exile the ability to brew multiple batches. Assuming they can get the staff and make the sales, they will be able to produce beer essentially continuously.
One bottleneck will be the cellar, as Exile currently has only three fermentation tanks, though at a 60 barrel capacity each they’re certainly nothing to sneeze at.
They also have six lager tanks in the massive cooler, as well as a brite tank. Another bottleneck will be serving. Since Exile has no dedicated serving tanks, every drop will be kegged. Much of it will be sold off-premise at bars and restaurants around town, in a similar strategy as CABCo has been adopting recently. However Exile has a much larger capacity, and plenty of room to grow.
At the time of my visit they did not yet have their own beer available, with one exception: they had a Maibock which was contract brewed at the Gordon Biersch facility in Kansas City. However, they have been madly brewing the past week and a half, and they should have a few locally-produced beers available soon. Among those will be a Munich gold lager, a honey lager and a hefeweissen.
The head brewer is John Woodford, a recent Iowa State grad. Though he has a degree from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, he has no professional brewing experience, so he seems like a strange choice for head of a new brewery. But the proof is in the pudding, so I’ll have to wait to judge until they have beer on offer that was brewed under his supervision.
The Maibock is a pale coppery amber with an opalescent haze. There is a bit of off-white head, but not much. The nose is malty and sweet, with notes of biscuits, toast and nuts. I’d like there to be more pronounced hop character, as that is one of the defining characteristics of a maibock.
The flavor is likewise sweet and bready. A bit of noble hops come out early but quickly fade. The sweetness is cloying, lingering far too long. If the hops were more assertive, that might not be as much of an issue. As it stands it’s tasty, but it’s hard to drink more than one.
Exile Maibock
3.2 (3-7-7-2-14)
Matt took me to 
Lucky Bucket Black & Tan
Thirsty Bear Howard St. IPA
On one side of the building, directly facing the old city wall, and beyond it the Rhein, there is a patio under the canopy of an old carousel and a fence made of barrel staves.
Oh, and their cat is ridiculously friendly.
The flavor of Loreley is barely dry, but still has a strong malt richness. The high quality malt used clearly shows through, so the beer tastes quite fresh. The palate is full and round without intruding. It is not bitter, but rather remarkably balanced.
which grows more prominent through the taste. The palate is full but still drinkable, but the 1689 would benefit from a bit more carbonation.
Verlies is the German word for “dungeon”. They properly serve this strong beer in a hefty stone mug.
A few folks from my program and I went on a brewery tour in Köln last weekend. To me ‘brewery tour’ implies a tour through a brewery, but instead it was a tour around Köln with stops at beer halls. It wasn’t what I expected, but it was a very good time anyway. The guide was named Frank Möhlenkamp and he was quite entertaining. He had plenty of anecdotes about the history of Köln and a unique manner. He even gave a decent (if somewhat simplified) description of the brewing process. Not as much information about the beer as I would have hoped, but an entertaining evening nonetheless.
He observed that one may elsewhere inside find a date of 1511, or if one were to dig a little deeper find the year 1912. I have noticed that this temporal confusion is a problem endemic with German breweries.
However, the statues here are important figures in the history of Köln. Perhaps the most interesting aspect is the figures underneath the statues, intended to represent what the person would see when they look in a mirror. The heroes of Köln would see angels and flowers and such, but the bottom row of statues holds the more infamous characters of Köln’s history, along with the Kölners’ impression of their true character.
The Gaffel Kölsch is a brilliant deep gold. There was some big-bubbled head but it went away quickly. It has some light and refreshing malt aroma.
Sprecher Hop on Top
Dortmund Brewery Museum
Sunday, October 24th, 2010This is the last post I took notes for while in Germany, and it seems an appropriate retrospective. Look forward to my forthcoming first post back in the United States, a cross-section of the newest and weirdest stuff coming out of New Glarus.
It was entirely by accident that I ended up spending the summer in Dortmund, onetime brewery capital of the world. I wasn’t even planning on going abroad, until my German teacher told our class about a summer program through her alma mater, the Technische Universität Dortmund, and I cannot thank her enough for encouraging me to apply.
So perhaps it is appropriate that it was only my very last day in Germany that I finally got around to visiting the Dortmund Brewery Museum.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the international popularity of Dortmund’s stronger version of the originally-southern pale lager, combined with the relative accessibility of its port, caused it to grow into the biggest beer producing city in Germany. Beer and Dortmund were synonymous (and still are, literally, in some parts of the Netherlands). Dortmund had more breweries per capita than anywhere else in the world, an erstwhile Portland.
On an unassuming side street in the north side of Dortmund sits one of the biggest breweries in northeastern Germany, Dortmunder Actien-Brauerei. Walking by it you might not even notice, save the smell of barley in the air.
But there is one welcoming stucco building with large windows on the south end of the complex that was once called the Hansa Brewery, and later the Kronen Brewery. Here is the home of the Brauerei-Museum Dortmund.
The museum is located in a former machine house, so while there are no big tanks or kettles to see, there is a big steam engine, and they’ve moved in a period bottling line as well as one of the original Union delivery trucks.
There is a large collection of memorabilia of the various Dortmund breweries: mugs and glassware, beer mats, bottles, labels, signs, and advertisements. This last bit especially allows the visitor to immerse oneself in another era. There is a fair amount of equipment, and numerous placards that explain the process of the production of beer. Unfortunately the signs are only in German, so an English speaker might wish to arrange for a guide.
The Museum may very well be a bit slanted towards the brands currently owned by the museum’s owner. That point notwithstanding, it provides a valuable look at the history of the beverage that made the city great. It would be all too easy to lose the stories of the people and places that drove Dortmund’s breweries’ growth, and with it the growth of export beer, especially given today’s high-speed merger-happy international beer market. Fortunately the existence of the Dortmund Brewery Museum ensures that won’t happen anytime soon.
A delightful antique. Every day each brewery worker was given a token that this machine would redeem for a free shift drink.
The large, shallow vessel is called a kuhlschip, at one time used to cool hot wort to fermenting temperatures (and it is still used for lambic). The device in back is a convoluted-flow chiller. The hot wort runs back and forth through the tubes, and cold water cascades down the outside.
A photograph of open fermenters at the former Hansa Brewery, proof that even high lager brewers have humble origins.
There is no better brand.
Tags: beer history, Brauerei Museum Dortmund, brewing museum, Dortmund, Dortmund Brewery Museum
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