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, [...]

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 [...]

Ever think of making your own malt?  Uncertain you can do it?  Sure you can. I have a couple of friends wanting to reproduce medieval beers starting from scratch – they’re growing old varieties of barley and/or wheat and hops, and will take them through all the steps to make beer.  One [...]

BJCP CLASS – we were given a choice of presentation topics, and I chose Malt.  Turns out Malt is one of the very first presentations, so I’ve been scrambling through a very busy week (end of fiscal quarter at work, Baronial At-Home on Wednesday at my house) to get something [...]

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 [...]

St. Paul’s Cathedral’s brewhouse grain bill for Anno Domini 1286, from the Domesday Book.  I mean, how cool is this?  For those of you who read the paper of Karl Hagen’s that I posted yesterday and maybe grooved on it but didn’t delve deep – meaning you didn’t open any [...]

According to The Timetables of History (almost as good as the Guinness Book for leafing through), hops were introduced to England from Artois in 1526.  There’s a story there – ! Beeton’s Date-book: An English Chronology from the Earliest Periods to the Current Period (1896) (boy was I surprised to [...]

This is a couple of years old, and very chatty, but I apparently used it as a class handout some time ago.  I do a number of things differently now, but this might still be useful…it’s copyrighted, folks. Elspeth Payne Class Handout A plug for varietals (different kinds of honey), [...]