People these days long to be a little more in touch with the rhythm of the land and the weather; a lively parade of seasonal beers is a delicious way to do it. And while commercial beers are nice, if you brew it yourself you can have a beer perfectly suited to your taste and mood, season after season. Right now the gales of winter are still blowing, but spring is just around the corner. Time to get brewing.
As homebrewers, we are often called upon to brew something special to celebrate a milestone: a wedding, a graduation, or just surviving another year in the cubicle. And when the audience is entirely beer-maniacal, anything goes. But the real test of a brewer is to please those used to cold, chilly and bland, while upholding your homebrew oath to always brew something interesting. It’s a balancing act that requires the brewer to deconstruct the beer preferences of his or her audience and assemble a subtle, but compelling, recipe.
It is our right as Americans to seize on tidbits of history, jumble them up and invent whatever kind of story is appealing. So let’s get on with that and start thinking about the beery possibilities. Note that the quantities suggested are for five-gallon batches. All of these should be fermented conventionally with lager yeast and given a cold conditioning commensurate with their strength. Don’t forget the diacetyl rest, a couple of days at cellar temperatures to allow any excess diacetyl released by the yeast to be reabsorbed.
Even with all their uncertainty, attempts at recreation can teach us about the beers of the past. And a historic perspective can be inspirational when trying to dream up new and unusual beers to brew. Thinking about history without having to worry about whether it is correct or not can be a great big hogshead of fun. Sometimes you just want to brew, history be damned.
American industrial lagers and light beers already reign in lawnmower-land, and they do serve their purpose. But as homebrewers, we can see obvious room for improvement to suit our own creative instincts and particular tastes. So here’s a few mini-recipes, which I leave to you to flesh out into actual malt, hops, wheat, oats and whatever else you can think of.
American industrial lagers and light beers already reign in lawnmower-land, and they do serve their purpose. But as homebrewers, we can see obvious room for improvement to suit our own creative instincts and particular tastes. So here’s a few mini-recipes, which I leave to you to flesh out into actual malt, hops, wheat, oats and whatever else you can think of.
American industrial lagers and light beers already reign in lawnmower-land, and they do serve their purpose. But as homebrewers, we can see obvious room for improvement to suit our own creative instincts and particular tastes. So here’s a few mini-recipes, which I leave to you to flesh out into actual malt, hops, wheat, oats and whatever else you can think of.
As art, every beer is part of a larger story, and comes out of a specific context, whether it’s a traditional classic or an avant-garde experiment. These stories, technological guideposts and aesthetic characteristics shape not only the specifics of the drink itself, but our expectations, attitudes and ultimately the nature of our interaction with it. Tradition is a metaphoric bucket for certain ideas that get poured into beer along with the malt and hops.
This upcoming book took six years of mostly full time effort to write and edit.It was transformative for me, and I hope the information will be for you as well. Here are some of my major takeaways about our amazing chemical senses and the ways they are processed in the brain.
It’s obvious that we human beings are all pretty different from one another—in appearance, experience, attitude, gender, and countless other attributes. Each of us has things that come effortlessly and others at which we struggle. It goes without saying that these differences affect our abilities as tasters. But how, exactly?