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 [...]

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 was tasked with a presentation on malt and malting for my BJCP class.  My instructor shared with me a PowerPoint presentation he and Guy Allan created for a class.  I’ve put together (at the eleventh hour) a PowerPoint for my own class.  I’m sharing them both here because they’re [...]

In my last two posts:  the Anglo-Saxon words beor, ealu, medu and wyn may not be what they seem.  British beer blogger Martyn Cornell takes a crack at sorting out the word histories and what we actually know about any of them. I am reprinting this with Mr. Cornell’s permission.  his Zythophile blog [...]

As I started to say in my last post, the Anglo-Saxon words beor, ealu, medu and wyn may not be what they seem.  It may be that we’ve been telling the wrong story about Anglo-Saxon feasts for long time.  Martyn Cornell takes a crack at sorting out the word histories and what we actually [...]

Beowulf, Bede, Aelfric’s Colloquy – in Anglo-Saxon, there are four words for fermented beverages, and lots and lots of descriptions of what happens when one drinks too much.  The four words look so much like modern English that they’ve been translated into the apparently parallel words for over a hundred [...]

The Book of Taliesin is a late Middle Welsh version of the ales of Gwion Bach and Taliesin, mostly around the court of Maelgyn Gynedd.  It was written in the 1550s, the same time Henry VIII was on the throne (or maybe collected then? Middle Welsh is 12th-14th c, and Taliesin was tenth c).  [...]

The inestimable Brother Adam, standard-setting meadmaker, preferred Montpellier Lalvin d-21 yeast, and was unhappy when it became unavailable in smaller-than-commercial lots for a while.  I’ve never used D-21, and wondered what it had that any of my regulars don’t.  (I use Brother Adam’s fallback, Montpellier/K1V-1116, quite a lot, and Lalvin [...]