Utopian Loop

Today was a trip to The Amana Colonies, which is a group of seven villages that form a loop and allow you to tour through them in a circle. Most of the interesting stuff was located in the Amana village. The rest either didn't have much to begin with or everything was closed. 

I just now realized I have no pictures of Millstream Brewing but that was our first stop once we arrived in Amana. While it was a neat place, I was very surprised by how tiny it was. My guess is that Millstream's storage and processing capacity is hardly any bigger than the two brewpubs in downtown Des Moines. Obviously the brewpubs don't have any bottling ability so a real brewery has that going for it. We had a few samples and I bought this Weizenbock which came in a huge 34oz bottle. I don't have anything there for scale, but it's a lot bigger than a wine bottle. Good stuff so far. 

Our next stop was the woolen mill, which is still operating. Lots of neat stuff in here, they had both antique and modern machinery view-able. With the addition of CNC looms, it only takes about two minutes to run each blanket, but that is only after a setup time of 4-5 hours which involves installing 250+ spools of wool yarn. 

This is showing the spools of yarn, getting funneled down onto one large, wide spool. 

After the woolen mill, we checked out a furniture fabrication shop. There was lots of neat stuff, all very well made.

This shop also makes clocks.

A couple shots here of one area in the furniture fabricating area.

After lunch and a little more walking, it was time for some espresso, we checked out this coffee/chocolate shop.

Next we stopped by a winery.

This place has a total capacity of 15,000 gallons. There wasn't much going on at this time as wine is only made from April-November and they'd just finished. Now it's mostly waiting in storage.

On the way through one of the smaller villages before heading home, we stopped at the state's largest walnut rocking chair. I was a little surprised that competition for "largest walnut rocker" is stiff enough that this one is only champion of Iowa.