PUBLISHED ARTICLES
I've been writing articles about beer and brewing since about 1990. I've covered a lot of territory from beer tasting to styles to branding to building home brewing equipment. Here are some that I think are still useful and relevant today.
All About Beer: The Taster. This newer column explores the fascinating and very important world of tasting as it relates to beer. I try to bounce back and forth between ingredients or particular sensory topics to more general topics like our perception, what is meant by quality and others.
I'm not talking about the bubbles swarming into foam on top of that IPA in front of you, but something entirely different. It's the bubble inside which every one of us lives, traveling through the world looking out at our own personal version of reality as we drift through it. The Hindus came to this conclusion millennia ago, and in many ways their metaphor is increasingly verified by science. Nothing about our perception is objective. To understand, we must abandon the comforting notion that our senses provide accurate and truthful representations of the world around us. From the glass on the table to the smells of the beer frothing up, to the sights and sounds of the barroom and beyond, our world usually feels solid and reliable enough. It is an illusion, however—nothing more than a projection created by our highly fallible perceptions. Ancient wisdom makes a point of it; modern science increasingly verifies this unsettling truth. A single element might seem an odd choice as a theme for a beer article, but this one is truly special. Of all the things in the universe our noses are capable of smelling, sulfur compounds are by far the stinkiest. Because of its importance in a host of biochemical processes, quite a few volatile sulfur compounds are found in beer. Many of them are detectable in astonishingly small quantities. Back in the 1970s, the United States was a vast beer desert. With little difference between brands except the color of the cans, our beer defied connoisseurship. While I do know people who were capable of distinguishing between beers made at different Pabst facilities back in the day, the big brewers had no need for passionate enthusiasts to weigh in on the quality, character and meaning of their products. Focused tasting was a job for professional panels with very specific techniques and goals solely in the quality control realm.
Every beer taster can recognize the bitter snap of hops on the palate, the caramel-to-roasty spectrum of malt aromas, and occasionally the spicy, fruity signatures of certain yeast strains. We love beer's boldness, and in recent years the volume has definitely been turned up. Amid all the hubub it's easy to overlook one of its most unique charms: mouthfeel.
All About Beer Homebrewing Column. Many of the early columns and recipes were reworked into Radical Brewing, so there's no point in posting them here, but there were several done after that book that might be of interest. I've included the best of those here.
All About Beer Features. From time to time, I've engaged lengthier topics on beer, brewing and ingredients, as well as travel pieces.
Zymurgy. This is the grand-daddy of all homebrewing magazines, and is the official publication of the American Homebrewers Association. it is also where I published my first article.
Brewing Techniques. This much-loved magazine covered brewing topics in a more in-depth manner than most other brewing publications and is still missed by many.