One sad testament to the speed of my, uh, creative process is that most of the “work” I’ve done since getting here has to do with transcribing the 25 hours of tape I recorded last summer.

Sigh.

Actually, it’s laborious, but not unpleasant—I have a weird, masochistic love for transcription. It forces you to stop and listen, again and again as you hit pause-rewind-play, to the people you were interviewing. Forgotten details pop out; themes emerge.

The last few days I’ve been pause-rewind-playing my way through a July 23, 2007, interview with Tom and Ken Koyen (and, for a bit, Ken’s son, Jesse). Tom and Ken are the sibling farmers whose energy, optimism, and muscle are the critical factor in the island’s ever-growing wheat empire. It started with 30 acres—their mom’s old dairy farm and another 15 acres Tom owned on the east side of the island. They’re now farming more than 600 in scattered parcels across the island—once-fallow farmland loaned to the project by enthusiastic islanders happy to see the land worked and happy for the tax break agricultural use will net them (which is something like $40 on the acre, but don’t quote me on that). 

This part of the story’s been told before, but, to recap: The wheat is bought by Caplan, to grind and use in brick-oven –baked bread and pastries for the hotel and its spinoff, the Washington Hotel Coffee Room in Madison. It also goes into dog biscuits, pasta, pancake mix, and a line of Washington Hotel beauty products (wheat berry facial scrub, anyone?). The first year or two, that was enough. But as Tom and Ken just kept acquiring more land and sowing more winter wheat, new outlets for their output were needed, or Caplan was going to drown in a pile of grain.

In 2005 Caplan, hotel owner Brian Vandewalle, and Brian Ellison, a land-use planner at Brian Vandewalle’s Madison firm, approached Capital Brewery to see if they might be interested in buying the wheat in bulk, for brewing. And, in a serendipitous twist almost too good to be believed, not only were they interested they were at that very moment actively seeking out a reliable source for Wisconsin-grown wheat, from which to make a Wisconsin-branded wheat beer. Within a few months Island Wheat Ale * hit taps across the state, and quickly became the brewery’s  most popular beer: by the end of the 2006 fiscal year Capital’s sales had jumped almost $1 million.

Caplan, Vandewalle, and Ellison went on to form their own wheat-based booze business, Death’s Door Spirits, whose island-branded vodka, gin, and whiskey are fast making inroads into bars and retail outlets across the Midwest. But though fields across Washington Island have sprouted “Island Wheat” signs (courtesy of the brewery), and the bars along Main Road are plastered with Island Wheat paraphernalia, until recently you couldn’t get the beer out of state.

Which brings me back to the Koyens. Listening to this 11-month-old tape I was startled by something forgotten, a moment when Ken—who in addition to farming is one of the island’s two commercial fishermen and owns one of the island’s four bars, and as far as I can tell sleeps about three hours a night—adamantly maintained that you could so get Island Wheat in Chicago, and not only could you get it in Chicago, you could get it at Wrigley Field.

I was doubtful, but, dutifully, I checked it out when I got home. No dice. At the Island Wheat harvest fest that fall I asked Capital brewer Kirby Nelson if and when it would be available south of Kenosha and he promised that it was on the list—just as soon as the brewery expanded its production capacity. And then I sort forgot about it. 

Well. Last month I stopped into a Division Street corner store to pick up a six-pack for a party—and there was Island Wheat, right next to the Dortmunder Gold. And an hour later, at the party, a friend told me he’d seen a giant pyramid of Island Wheat at Whole Foods. I called Kirby.

Yes, they’d finished the new brew house, itself funded in large part by the mad profits from the brewery’s cash cow. They were breaking into Chicago and, in a month or so, they’d have another island wheat brew on the market, this one called “Rustic Ale,” which someone else told me was a sort of chewy, amber ale along the lines of New Belgium’s own cash cow, Fat Tire. I have yet to see it anywhere but Capital’s website, but Kirby promised to let me come down to Middleton for the launch party. (Kirby! Call me!)

In the meantime, Chicago, Old Style still has a lock on the Wrigley concession, but you can get Island Wheat at Sahar Grocery, kitty-corner from Phyllis’s at Division and Wood.

 

* Maybe you want to know what it tastes like. It’s a pale, light-bodied wheat beer that’s less sweet than, say, Blue Moon and a less of a mouthful than a traditional hefeweizen. It’s actually relatively crisp, for a wheat beer: though the grain is still front and center there’s a fair amount of acidity. Some beer geeks ** would call it a session beer–or, if you’re the Capital Times, a lawnmower beer.

** Other beer geeks disagree.