FLAT12 Bierwerks

You want to know what goes into the food and drink you consume? Maybe you want a better sense of what your neighbors do for a living or what the fuss is all about when the spirit of the day seems slanted toward going local, buying local, sourcing local, etc. What’s it mean on the street level? No better place to learn and enjoy than Dorman Street at the Butcher-Brewer Tour. 

Take a tour. Take two in fact. The Dorman Street Butcher-Brewer Tour, held jointly by Flat 12 Bierwerks and Smoking Goose. The brewers and butchers at both will take you behind the scenes in an informative tour complete with time for Q & A, sampling and socializing. And after the tours, you’ll have time to indulge in a broader sampling of what we have to offer while relaxing in the Flat 12 taproom and patio.

Thursday May 24th

Sunday, May 20th could get dark. And that’s a good thing. We’re talking 12 releases of dark beers, including some first time releases.

It’s Black Sunday. What’s it look like? Here’s the line-up:

Blackberry Porter

*Haggard Jo

Credit where credit is due: Black Sunday inspiration

Let’s do a contest. It’s the month of May. In Indy, that means it’s time for special food and drink: rolls and apple butter from Jug’s Catering, Fried Chicken Track-pak from Kroger or Marsh, big-’ol floppy tenderloins from the concessionaires at 16th and Georgetown. And it’s time for beer (when is it not?).

We’re having a Pre-Race Party and creating a beer just for for the month. Thinking about how to go about that, our brewers decided to go with something that gave props to the pre-race party guest of honor, #27 James Hinchcliffe. He’s the Andretti Autosport driver of the GoDaddy car, he hails from Canada, so the brewers created a Canadian lager in his honor. That’s as far as we got – now we need your help.

THE CONTEST

Can you name the Hinchcliffe beer? Comment on this page or our Flat 12 Bierwerks facebook page before next Thursday(10th) at noon. James himself will be the ultimate arbiter. If he picks your name, you get two free tickets to our pre-race party on the 12th. Good luck and Godspeed. Start your naming, now. *

*Need a little help? Visit the Andretti site or become a citizen of Hinchtown to better know this exciting young driver.

Picture “Sister City” programs and you might think of lonely marker signs posted on the city limits that declare such a relationship or pictures of mayors or other dignitaries standing for stilted pictures with other mayors and dignitaries, holding a plaque perhaps. That’s the formal stuff. But when you look at Indianapolis and Cologne as sister cities, it’s worth at least taking a look up. More precisely, take a look up when you’re at the corner of Vermont and New Jersey in Indianapolis.

You’ll see the St. Mary’s Catholic Church. A nice, classic edifice. One of our local historians, like Connie Zeigler, might offer an extensive background on church and its significance. I’ll simply direct you to the picture on the left, the Cologne Cathedral (Kolner Dom). St. Mary’s is basically the same design, scaled down by a third. Located one block from Das Deutsche Haus (The Athenaeum) in Indianapolis, St. Mary’s is a pretty cool reminder of how tightly connected the history of our town/state/country is to certain places in the world, including Europe.

St. Mary's Catholic Church, Indianapolis

Wikipedia Image, Cologne Cathedral

So, what are we gonna do? And what’s this got to do with beer?

Allow some Schmaltz here – we’re gonna roll out the barrels, a whole bunch of em in fact, of Karousel Kolsch. As you probably know, as a fan of beer, Kolsch is unique in the beer world. The Beer Judging Certification Program provides this background:

History: Kölsch is an appellation protected by the Kölsch Konvention, and is restricted to the 20 or so breweries in and around Cologne (Köln). The Konvention simply defines the beer as a “light, highly attenuated, hop-accentuated, clear top-fermenting Vollbier.”

So with that as an intro, allow us to introduce our Kolsch-style beer, tapping today (May 3) as a tribute to our sister city in Germany. We hope you enjoy it. We’ll see you soon!

Flat 12 is a non-smoking facility. We do maintain ash trays on the patio (north side of taproom) for our customers who like to light up.

Outdoor spot at the Flat12 brewery

“What’s on tap?” A question we hear at the brewery. Almost never with a pun intended. So, how do you know what’s on tap at the brewery? Regular check ins on this site is one easy and usually reliable option. Sure, on occasion something gets thrown on tap at the last minute for fun or the Flat12 web guy loses his mind and goes on a 5 day bender and things aren’t totally accurate, but for the most part, if you look on most screens* at the righthand column of our website >>>>> right over there, you’ll see our beer list and you’ll know near-exactly what to expect at the brewery.

*On mobile, just scroll down.

Happy Beer Hunting!

Book Release and Signing

Jared Carter is an author based in Indianapolis. Jared and his wife, Diane, live nearby the brewery in the Windsor Park neighborhood. Flat 12 is proud to announce that on Sunday, April 29th, at 4:00, Jared will be setting up in the brewery taproom to introduce his new book, A Dance in the Street, and to offer signed copies for sale.

Press on Jared and his book, plus a couple of poems of interest to local residents, follows:

A Dance in the Street from Wind Publications

Jared Carter has been a recipient of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, the Poets’ Prize, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and two literary fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.

He lives on the Near Eastside of Indianapolis with his wife, Diane, a teacher of English as a second language.

His new book, A Dance in the Street, may be ordered from Wind Publications, whose web site is http://windpub.com/, or from local booksellers, or from Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble. About the book:JaredCarter About The Book (PDF)

Additional information may be found in his Wikipedia entry, his blog,

Rushing the Growler and his web site, Jared Carter Poetry, at http://jaredcarter.com/.

A  few poems and a note from Jared:

“I’ve lived on Indy’s Near Eastside since 1972 – first in Woodruff Place, then in Windsor Park.  I’ve seen a lot of changes during that time, mostly for the better.  But in the 70s, when I first came here, Mass Avenue was not yet gentrified and East 10th Street was a pretty wild place.  In those days I tried to write about what I saw and encountered.  That’s the writer’s first rule: write about what you know.” – Jared Carter

Entryways along Massachusetts Avenue

They are like rooms with one wall missing:

darkness will brick them up completely.

Inside, you can sit wrapped in newspapers

with a half-pint of Richard’s, and imagine

you have come into a warm house again.

Each time you move there is a crackling

as though you sat before a dwindling fire.

____

Madstone

For three bucks at a flea market he bought a stone

guaranteed to draw the poison out of a mad dog’s bite.

Took it home and put it on top of his television.

____

Wooden Houses on an Old Street

They ought to be sitting in armchairs

in a dayroom.  They have undergone

innumerable operations, and something

is still not right.  They keep

dead refrigerators on their porches

and old Plymouths in their back yards.

In the middle of the block one house

has begun to undress, has shucked off its

asbestos siding and two-by-four fire escape

like a crazy person running down a hallway.

The others pretend not to notice.  Wind

billows the plastic film over their eyes.

____

Old-Timers

I like their stories about snow –

how deep it got by spring.  And nobody

would eat tomatoes, they were poison.

Butcher-knife outlasts a man

if you hone it on a crock’s edge.

The blades get wafer thin and curved,

like wings.  Wait until second frost

before going to look for ginseng,

black walnut, sassafras.  This

is how you shake a geode to see

if it’s hollow.  A Petoskey stone

will polish itself in your pocket

if you don’t take it out.  Keep a pot

of aloe handy, it’s the best thing

for burns.  Survive.  Remember.  Know.