Come out this weekend as we celebrate TWO YEARS OF BEER!
Friday we have Trivia on Tap – 2nd Anniversary Edition and Saturday we are celebrating 12-10 pm. Patio furniture is out and we’ll have a Crawfish Boil at 5 pm and the band ‘Chicken Parts’ will be playing at 7 pm. Enter our customer appreciation drawing for $100+ in IA gift cards all weekend.
In our second year, Luke and Bill brewed 81 barrels or 2,511 gallons of beer in our trusty retro-fitted dairy tanks. And they canned over 4,400 cans of to-go beers. We brewed 36 unique recipes typically rotating a new beer on the menu every two weeks. Below is the 2023 recap of what we brewed, *for repeats:
- Main Squeeze – grapefruit sour
- You’re My Boy Blue – blueberry sour
- Land of Aahh’s Lager – Kansas Sampler Foundation collab
- Side Eye Saison
- Pivot Pale Ale
- Slam Dunkel – German wheat ale
- Red Trucks – Irish red ale
- Cherry Kolache – Czech inspired cherry sour
- Pinky’s Pils
- Juice Willis – hoppy wheat ale
- Coco Canal – coconut porter
- Coffee Coco Canal
- Bohemian Rhaspberry – raspberry sour
- Dandelion Vine – sour with dandelion tea and toasted grapevine
- Lovewell Lager – Mexican lager
- Billy Beer IPA – ALES for ALS collab
- Jiggy Wit It
- Strawbeery – strawberry sour
- Barbara Streisberry – rhubarb strawberry sour
- *Scandiego IPA
- Blackberry Scandiego
- Rind over Matter – watermelon wheat
- *Oktoberfest
- Dan-O-Lantern – pumpkin spiced Oktoberfest lager
- Updawg – imperial porter
- Imperial Porter + Frontenac red grape beer wine hybrid – *barrel aging, ETA March 2024
- *Cherry Kolache
- *Plum My Lady – sandhill plum sour
- Cuke Sykwalker – cucumber basil sour
- *Flannel Stout
- Feathered Coffee – oatmeal stout with Feathered Nest cold brew
- *Red Trucks
- Pomegranate Side Eye
- MaHamms
- Juniper Juice
- Mariah Cherry
- Cran’t Stop, Won’t Stop – Not released yet
- Gander
- Kansas AF – wheat beer with KS Malt Co. barley/wheat, KS Hop Company hops, and locally foraged sumac berries
In two years we are only five states away from welcoming visitors from all 50 states to our brewery. *This US map didn’t go up until April 2022. We will offer the first person from the remaining states a beer on me:
- Connecticut
- Delaware
- Kentucky
- Mississippi
- Vermont
Help us by leaving us a review on Google Maps telling people what you love about to help other travelers and beer nerds find us.
IA and other Kansas rural breweries received some great press and we made the cover of the Kansas City Star / Wichita Eagle in April. View the article here (paywall)
We also were featured in an editorial by our good friend Christy Hopkins owner of the Greeley County Republican featuring her visits to Courtland – From the editor’s desk / Successful Communities Define Rural Swagger.
Jennifer made the Kansas Tourism Guide for 2024 featuring IA! View the digital version here.
We love being a space for people to connect with friends and family. This year we hosted over 80 events including but not limited to twenty musicians, trivia, SINGO, adult spelling bee, gravel biking nights, irrigation canal tours, pop-up shops by Creekside Land & Cattle and Riverside Bakes, arts & crafts, murder mystery, Kansas Day, Sunday Fun Days, build-your-own bloody beer bar, food trucks, and our favorite Postal Pizza!
We started doing free samples at local businesses like Feathered Nest, Depot Market, and the Salty Sow.
IA donated over $2,000 to organizations like the ALES for ALS, Courtland Pride Club, Republic County Community Foundation, and most recently Kansas Sampler Foundation through a collaboration with Kansas AF which is on tap now!
In the summer we used old kegs to create some outdoor space!
We worked with the City of Courtland and Adri’s to designate a common consumption district in Courtland during special events. This allows our beer to go outside our taproom during Fun Day or the Big Kansas Road Trip last May. *CFD is always the last Saturday in July.
We loved getting the chance to highlight local produce in our beers. From the Depot Market we used blackberries, raspberries, watermelon, and pumpkins. We also used C&C High Tunnels for strawberries and rhubarb. Salt Box Farms in Arkansas brought us some amazing strawberreis as well. We foraged for sumac, mulberries, tart cherries, juniper berries, grapevine, dandelion flowers, and sandhill plums.
Our favorite was having Dave DeJoia a fellow Courtland Fermentation Club member let us pick Frontenac Red grapes for our soon-to-be-named Imperial Porter which was aged in his wine barrels for the last six months.
We owe a lot to our beertenders and couldn’t have done this without their excellent service. We are so lucky to have them on our IA team!
And most importantly we want to say THANK YOU to all those who have supported us along this crazy journey with a kind word, small purchase, or regular visits. This started nearly a decade ago with a Mr. Beer kit, Courtland Fermentation Club ‘meetings’, buying a building, renovations, business planning, loans, and asking ourselves over and over and over is this going to work?
Each time we see Main Street packed with cars/trucks for us and Adri’s we are reassured this is indeed going to work.
Irrigation Ales is truly a reflection of the Courtland and Republic County area and all the momentum with all the other great businesses and projects improving our communities. We can’t wait to see what the next generations of young people coming back will add.