All things having to do with fermented beverages, including craft beer, mead, and wine – beautifully made and attempts thereto.
Brewdog is a Scottish brewery/beer bar chain that is controversial (and wildly successful) in Scotland. They’re lively and funny and they make painfully hoppy American-style beers. They use 100% Scottish malt, which I think is pretty cool. Last year they grew revenues by 95% and added six more beer bars […]
I thought to myself, great, you’ve just had this intense experience tasting 55 or so new beers over the course of a weekend at the Beer Blogger’s Conference, but what new information did you bring home with you? Some of these beers were so rare we had mere sips and were […]
Summer’s not over yet, so you should know about this – there’s a way to take your homebrew to places that won’t let you bring glass. Hydro Flask makes steel growlers – a 64-oz. flask with a double-walled vacuum-sealed insulated chamber designed to keep hot hot and cold cold. It looks like an oversized water […]
This woman’s first real Irish Guinness is imminent, be prepared for the ground to shake. I’m going to Ireland for a week, my first time there, and then off to Scotland for another longish week, ending at the European Beer Bloggers Conference in Edinburgh. We’ll be there the same time that the Scottish […]
You can imagine my extreme hesitation at the idea of making a bochet mead. I am a cold-method meadmaker. I heat water as little as possible to mix with the must, and heat the honey not at all. the days of pasteurizing my own honey are long past. Heat drives […]
Preview of European Beer Bloggers Conference 2013 in Edinburgh - and this is just the pub crawl.
Preview of European Beer Bloggers Conference 2013 in Edinburgh – and this is just the pub crawl. In about six weeks I’ll be in Edinburgh for three days with more than fifty beer bloggers from the U.K. and across the Continent. I know, poor, poor, pitiful me. Just to make […]
Clever beer puns are all the rage, and bonus points if you can get the word “hop” sandwiched in there – Hops of Wrath, Hopsecutioner, Hoptimus Prime, Hoppy Ending, Tricerahops, Hopocalypse, Smooth Hoperator, etc etc etc. Beer names tend to be playful and punny: What kind of beer they are […]
First thing, let me put in a plug for the American Homebrewers Association conference June 27-29 in Philadelphia this summer. The theme is “Brewing Up a Revolution.” Just ’cause I can’t go (my other hobby has a command performance) doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. It’ll be amazing, and there will […]
I have only ever run one marathon, and in the cause of full disclosure, I didn’t run all that much of it. I did complete the whole enchilada, got the medal and everything. See, I’m a lousy runner. I don’t expect to ever run in another marathon in this lifetime. […]
Contrary to what you may believe, the Reinheitsgebot, the famous German beer purity law, was no trailblazer. Almost thirty years earlier there was the Statuta Thaberna in Thuringia (see map). I’ve had a lot more trouble finding the exact text for the Statuta than I did for the Reinheitsgebot (though […]
I made it through a whole hour-long presentation on malt without once mentioning diastatic power (what it is, how it works) or proteolytic enzymes. Whups. Thank goodness they were at least in my handout (see my last post for the handout). So, to make up for this rather large omission, […]
In my BJCP class the teacher, Les White, assigned a presentation on malt and malting to me. We each signed up for our preferred topics, then Les assigned one topic to each student and set the date for their presentation. Mine was the very first. I was beyond nervous, and of course had work […]