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An Ale Pales In Brooklyn

A session on eBay led to my acquiring a handwritten recipe from the Howard & Fuller Brewing Company of Brooklyn, NY. One Hundred Years of Brewing(1903) says: “This house manufactures fine ales and porters only and represents the oldest business in those lines on Long Island.” Founded by Junius A. Fuller in 1835, the brewery moved to the corner of Bridge and Plymouth Streets, a neighborhood now called DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), an up-and-coming area near the Brooklyn Bridge. The stationery is preprinted with the date 190_, so the recipe probably stems from that decade, but it could be a bit later. There’s a bit of shorthand in the brewer’s notes, so this may take a bit of guesswork to figure out.

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Seeing Red (Ale, That Is)

“Red” was an encompassing term used through the middle ages and later to indicate the whole sweep of brown-colored beers, as distinguished from white, (usually wheat) beers, and each group of brewers had its own network of guilds. White beer was the more avant-garde of the two, adopting hops at an early date, while red beer brewers clung to the gruit herb tradition a couple of centuries longer.

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A Spring Fling Thing

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. 

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Brewing the Perfect Party Beer

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. 

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Freakin’ the Euro-Beers

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. 

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A Yardfull of Lawnmower Beers

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.

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The Bittersweet Taste of Tradition

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.

A full glass of cold lager beer with frothy foam.

The Limits of Lager

When beer culture was a shiny new thing decades ago, experts often divided the world into lagers on one side and ales on the other. Some even equated lagers with white wines and ales with reds. The idea was that ales were bolder, stronger and more bitter than lagers. Assuming that lager meant only pale, pilsner-like beers, maybe there’s some logic to it.