Topeka brewery wins gold medal in Denver - Weekly Specialty Beer Report

Modern Brewery Age, Nov 11, 2002

AP--It isn't hard to find a good beer in Topeka, KS. That is what Topekan John Dean will tell you. Earlier this month, the brewmaster at Blind Tiger Brewery & Restaurant took home two medals for his work at the nation's largest beer festival.

"People seem surprised by the quality," he said of his customers at the Blind Tiger. "They're shocked to get that kind of beer in Topeka. You generally have to go to bigger cities to find it. They're shocked that we've got it here in the Midwest."

Dean won a gold medal in Denver at the 2002 Great American Beer Festival for his American-style wheat beer--called Raw Wheat. It is the brewery's biggest seller. Dean also took home a silver medal in the rye beer category.

The American-style wheat category was one of the most competitive at the festival with 46 entries.

In 1998, Dean won his first national award when he won a gold medal at the festival for his raspberry wheat beer. In 2001, he won a silver medal for his smoke-flavored beer--Smoky the Beer. Because of the stiff criteria in each category, a gold medal wasn't awarded in that category that year, making Dean's the best in the country, albeit by default. "They don't hand medals out to just any beer that comes down the line," he said.

Dean, 35, started brewing beer in 1990 when he bought a brewing kit and taught himself the ropes. His father told stories of his own home-brewing experiments. He started brewing commercially in 1996, and has been at the Blind Tiger for the past three years. Part-owner Pam Caplinger said she gives her brewmaster free rein. "He knows this business so well, and he is so good at it, that when he says he wants to do something and when it's in line with the budget, we say go for it," she said.

Dean used only Kansas wheat to brew his award-winning wheat beer. Farmer Dan Cain of Berryton in northeast Kansas has been growing and harvesting the hard red winter wheat Dean uses in his wheat beer.

Dean said he first talked with Cain, a fourth-generation Kansas farmer, about using the wheat at a May barbecue contest at the Kansas Expocentre.

Cain developed a special cleaning process by which he cleans and aerates every kernel, or berry, of wheat before selling it to Dean. Cain credited Kansas State University for breeding the variety of wheat that he and most other farmers grow in the state.

Most brewers who use raw wheat imported from other countries, Dean said. Wheat grown in Kansas, he said, is geared more for use in bread than beer. Some German growers, however, have developed strains of wheat for use specifically in beer.

Germany is where you import from if you're serious about making a good raw wheat beer, Dean said. But that didn't sit well with the native Kansan.

"It just rubbed me the wrong way to use German wheat and me living in the wheat state," he said.