Friends often ask me to review their brewing recipes and strategies. With all-grain brewers, this usually amounts to minor tweaking of ingredients and proportions. For extract-steep and partial-mash brewers, though, I encounter common issues with regard to grain utilization, tricky concerns that are often glossed over in brewing instructions.
I have always had a particular fondness for the emphatic malt character, smoothness and underlying elegance of noble hops in ordinary German biers. I was especially enamored with bocks and that pure expression of malt. Bocks are beers of extraordinary finesse in spite of their fortitude. Brewing them at home can be something of a challenge, and it is critical to follow the bullet points for successful lager brewing outlined in another recent column of mine; short lag time, steady fermentation, diacetyl rest and proper lagering. German beer styles are generally considered fairly rigid in their composition, but bocks offer some room within the styles if you are interested in classic recreations, and are excellent for experimentation.
Those first few months of craft beer epiphany are heady indeed, filled with moment after moment of wide-eyed revelation. These palate-popping new brews had little in common with the mainstream stuff that you seemingly couldn’t live without. Craft beer had flavor, dark beer was actually delicious, hops in excess were heavenly, and most importantly, it was proudly all-malt. Then you discovered that some of the most respected breweries in the world used sugar and adjuncts to actually enhance their beer. Read More…
With homebrewing comes the epiphany that nearly anything can be included in a beer recipe, and the familiarity with fruit beers over the past 20 years has made those a favorite among us. But, blending malt, hops and fruit is best negotiated with care and forethought. Even so, the possibilities are numerous, since fresh fruit is often seasonal, cheap or even free, and frozen fruit and purees are always available. Read More…
Brewing Our Own American microbrewers have done more than their share in the past 30 years to enrich and enliven the brewing tapestry. They have reintroduced literally all of the traditional styles, put a unique Yankee twist on some of them and even invented a few of their own.
As the season turns, so does the weather, and of course, so do our beer preferences. For some, wintry brewery offerings make the long, cold months tolerable. Brewers design them as a means to capture the season with a warming and more formidable character, or with a bit of panache to pair with the fare and ambiance of this time of year. Read More…
