Moving On Up---Backpocket Brewing Co.

McGregor IA

I recently took a trip to McGregor, Iowa to talk to Jacob Simmons , the brewer for Backpocket Brewing Co. , never heard of it, there's a reason ,it's not built yet. Jacob is currently the brewer at Old Man River Restaraunt and Brewery, a brewpub nestled in the bluffs of Northeast Iowa right along the Mississippi river. This little brewpub was started in 2008 by two McGregor natives, Dave Strutt, a retired lawyer, and his wife Marcy. The 120+ year old building was originally an office space used for the Diamond Jo Casinos and went through many evolutions until it became Old Man River in 2008. Jacob did his undergrad at the University of Iowa and followed that with a short stint as a microbiology grad student in Washington, before falling into the brewing industry where he eventually landed the job with Old Man River.  Jacob Wanted to make Old Man River stick out from the rest of the breweries and he did that in a few ways. First he decided to use decoction mashing, a traditional way of brewing often used in Germany. He also decided to make German inspired beers , mainly lagers, using the German purity law. The German purity law requires you to make beer with only grains, water, hops, and yeast. So sorry you won't be seeing a shandy or any other fruit beer in their line-up anytime soon.

Brewhouse at Old Man River

Drawing of BackPocket brewing Coralville

Jacob has fine tuned his recipes and the brewery has become quite successful so what else to do but to distribute. Old Man River, however isn't distributing under Old Man River; they're distributing under Backpocket- Coralvill, Iowa's first brewery. Yep the crew at Old Man River, with Jacob at the helm, is moving on up and building a state of the art ,energy-efficient brewery in the Iowa City-Coralville area. The brewery will be a 33 barrel system that will quickly become one of the largest breweries in Iowa. They will be producing the same German Lagers that they do now at Old Man River but will be contracting out their excess space to other breweries until it is needed for their own production. But, it's still going to be awhile till you see Backpocket on the shelves of your local Hy-Vee because they haven't even struck ground yet on the brewery and don't plan on having bottles for sale until the spring of 2012 So if you're curious about this German inspired brewery and it's amazing beer take a trip up to McGregor and check out Old Man River (who has an amazing menu by the way), or you can catch them at the Iowa Craft Beer Tent. Backpocket will bringing five of their beers- the Slingshot Dunkel, my personal favorite the Jacknife GPA, Gold Coin German Blonde, Pennywhistle  Bavarian Whear, and their summer seasonal. Come out to the Iowa Craft Beer tent  and try them all and check in later on "My Brewing Adventure."