(Johnston, Iowa) – Two law enforcement officers from Cass County are set to graduate Friday morning from the 46th DPS (Dept. of Public Safety) Basic Academy. The ceremony for recruits takes place in Johnston. According to Iowa State Patrol Sgt. Alex Dinkla, for the past 10-weeks, the 17 recruits – including Dustin Gelner and Tyler Shiels, from Cass County – have completed courses on the laws of arrest, search and seizure, defensive tactics, arrest techniques, precision driving, firearms, emergency management services, criminal law, human relations, physical fitness, human trafficking, motor vehicle law and many other law enforcement-related courses.

Following graduation, Dustin Gelner, a former Atlantic Police Officer, and Tyler Shiels, formerly with the Cass County Sheriff’s Department, will both become members of the Iowa State Patrol.

Guests speaker for the ceremony is IDPS Commissioner Stephen K. Bayens. The event is open to family members of the recruits.

(Radio Iowa) – There are some students at Iowa State University who can actually say beer is helping them get their degree. I-S-U professor Robert Brown has been brewing beer on his own for years and was approached by the Center for Crops Utilization Research to develop a class on the subject.  “So I scrambled working with the folks that approve courses at Iowa State and got it approved last November, and here we are teaching it,” Brown says. He got help from an I-S-U Alum who donated brewing equipment his company makes to get them going, and the crop center found space for the brewing lab.

“The students get a lecture once a week, and then they spend the whole afternoon in the laboratory,” Brown says. “And they are introduced to different kinds of equipment appropriate to whether it’s home brewing they are interested — or to look at commercial brewing of beer.” He admits some people question a beer brewing course on campus — but he says there’s a lot to it. “The course is called the science and practice of brewing. And I put science first because the students are asked to reach back to what they learned their freshman and sophomore years in chemistry and biology and microbiology, and things that they learned — especially those who are engineers — to heat transfer, thermal dynamics, and apply that to the brewing of the beers,” according to Brown.

Robert C. Brown (left) works alongside Jessica Brown (no relation) while brewing their Capsaicin Sour ale. (2021 photo via ISU Engineering News)

He says you can’t just throw the ingredients together and expect to get a good beer. It takes some time. “Working out how much grain and how much water to work into it,” he says. “So it really is for many of them I think a culmination of their studies at the university — whether it was food science or mechanical engineering.” Brown says the industry has changed so much in the last several years and there’s more happening now as well. “There’s talk about hard seltzers for example and non-alcoholic beers, so there’s a revolution that’s technology driven,” he says.

Brown says the talk also centers on whether to brew large batches of beer you can market nationwide, or focus on smaller batches to be sold locally. Students in the class do have to be 21. Brown says he takes a team approach to the brewing process. There are five students assigned to each of the four identical brew stations, and sometimes they are trying to determine if one brew was better than the other with the same recipe.

He started the brewing class in January and says the batches of beer have been improving.

(Radio Iowa) – A northwest Iowa man was killed in a two-vehicle accident on Monday afternoon. The Iowa State Patrol reports that at about 2:30 p.m., 71-year-old Curtis Brownmiller of Spencer was driving a 2017 Nissan westbound on Highway 18, east of Hull when he struck the back of a truck driven by 43-year-old Jeffrey Ver Hoef of Hull, which was stopped and waiting for traffic to clear before turning left.

Brownmiller was taken to the Sioux Center Health Hospital by ambulance, where he died from his injuries.

(Radio Iowa) – A woman who lived on the Meskwaki settlement near Tama died Monday after being attacked by a pack of dogs. The fatal attack took place in the area of Springs Road, which is a little more than a mile southeast of the Meskwaki Casino and south of U-S Highway 30, near the Iowa River. Details of the incident and the identity of the person who died have not yet been released.

All of the dogs suspected to have been involved in the incident have been killed, according to the Meskwaki Nation Police Department.