Getting ready to pick some locally grown hops at Sulphur Creek Farms!

Aren't they georgous? More details to come...

From the Leading Economic Indicators department...

There's a lot of doom and gloom in the economic news these days, but I noticed something interesting and maybe positive today - the price for recycled cardboard is trending upwards! We end up with a lot of cardboard each week, after breaking down all of the boxes our raw materials come in. We collect it and take it over to Smurfit-Stone( actually, it's now RTS Packaging) near Fisk University. They take in tons of cardboard every day, and will actually pay you for it! Well, before the Great Recession, they were paying us around $69 per ton. In late 2008, during the height of the crisis, demand for recycled cardboard disappeared, and Smurfit quit paying anything at all for cardboard - we took it over anyway, better than going in a landfill. But since then, the price has come back up, to just recently $105 per ton. I don't know what that means for everyone, but for us - pizza days at the brewery will come more often!

It's a beautiful sight - bottling Sue today!

Hop Project #56, bottled 8/9/11, label reads "56. AUG09.11"

Columbus and Nugget first wort hopped, Nugget at 45 min, then Galaxy at 30, 15, and 5 min. Dryhopped with Galaxy and Nugget.

I'm loving this one! Very soft bitterness, tropical fruit, orange, lemon, but lingering dry bitterness. These hops are amazing! Probably one of the best Hop Projects we've done.

This will go out today destined for middle TN and Knoxville. Make sure you try some! We only got enough of these hops for one batch.

Cheers,

Linus Hall
Yazoo Brewing

If you are in the Jackson, MS area - check out the Out of Bounds Show on 105.9 at 9:45 AM

If you are in the central MS area, check out the Out of Bounds Show on 105.9 FM at around 9:45 AM. I'll be on with Bo Bounds, talking up the southern craft beer lifestyle. Bo and his crew are big supporters of southern craft brew, and we are grateful for their support!

Cheers,

Linus

New Facebook page! Check it out!

We've updated our Facebook page, and would love to get some feedback. We are seeing more and more people using Facebook to get information about our brewery, even more than our website. So we've added a lot of the information on our website to our Facebook page. Take a look and see what you think! (And "like" us while you are there! Thanks!)

http://www.facebook.com/yazoobrewing

Update on our "bottled on" date stamp...

As you may have noticed, we are no longer notching the side of the labels on our bottled beer to indicate when the beer was packaged. Our new line came with the promise of a real date stamp on every label. Well, that little hot stamp coder is trickier to get set up right than it should be, and it doesn't always hit the same spot on the bottle. Plus, the stamp can be blurred at times. We have been working to dial it in, but the numbers can be hard to read at times. So, we are going to switch to using letters to indicate the month - like "JUN" for June, or "JUL" for July. So as you can see in the photo on the right, this batch of Dos Perros was bottled JUN29.11 or June 29, 2011.

With our new bottling line, we're confident that our beer will hold up well for at least three months, possibly longer. But you can always see how fresh the beer is by checking the label, or by checking the top of the case box if we have a case display out. I personally wish all beers were date-coded, so I could judge for myself how fresh it was. Some beers are fine with a little age on them - big, bottled-conditioned Belgian beers for example - while some go downhill quickly - like hoppy IPAs. "Best before" dates are a step in the right direction, but you don't know if the brewer is using a three month window, a six month window, a year...