NHC Round One Judging (2016, Austin)

April 5, 2016 by Leave a Comment
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Judging Pilsners with Corey Martin.

On Friday and Saturday of last week, the Austin NHC site held its first round judging. I, along with many other Austin ZEALOTS and other Austin area homebrewers, descended upon 4th Tap Brewing and judged over 700 beers, finishing the task a day ahead of schedule.

Every year I judge, I try to think of the bigger picture afterwards and see if I can identify any trends or find anything worth writing about from the experience. Then I write about it anyway.

Judging at a large competition, you get to sample a lot of beers. This year, I judged 6 flights over the two days, ranging from 5 to 12 beers in a flight, with 7 or 8 being the median number (IIRC). Plus, there’s always the “holy crap, you have got to try this” moments when another judge finds a particularly spectacular beer and shares it. And of course, there’s the groans when judges encounter a real stinker. So, each judge gets to sample a fair amount of beer and gets some idea of what the other judges are encountering. On the other hand, one judge’s experience can’t be taken as a statistically valid sample, so these are just my observations.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: Brewed For Thought, Uncategorized

BrewDog Releases Its Recipes

February 26, 2016 by 1 Comment
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Not a dog.

The Scottish brewery BrewDog has released a .pdf file containing all of its recipes in 5.0-gallon (19-L) homebrew recipe form. (Scroll down the page to the link in the middle to download the file.)

Many breweries have been helpful to homebrewers over the years, giving out their recipes to brewing magazines, homebrew clubs, and individual brewers. But, I can only think of a couple breweries that self-published their beer recipes as homebrew recipes. Jester King published some of theirs awhile ago and . . . help me out. If you know of a commercial brewery website with homebrew recipes posted on it, drop me a line at chris at beerandwinejournal dot com and send me the link. I’ll compile them and post the list. (Don’t bother with clone recipes posted on other sites for now, just homebrew recipes posted on the brewery’s own website.)

[Update: Stone published its recipe for Stone Pale Ale, when it discontinued that brand. They’ve also published a book with many of their recipes and even gave this website a clone recipe (see below).]

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Hops Lose Alpha Acids In Storage (Part 2 of 3)

February 24, 2016 by Leave a Comment
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Alpha acid loss in two hop varieties over time, estimated from data from Hop Union. (In reality, the rate of loss is likely not linear. See the next article for more details.)

As I detailed in the first half of this article, hop alpha acids levels decline during storage. Proper handling can slow the degradation of the alpha acids, but even properly stored hops gradually lose their bitterness over time. In this post, we’ll examine if the loss if alpha acids is great enough to matter, and how to account for it if you do wish to take it into consideration. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Brewing Techniques, Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,

Link Fixed (Your Homebrew Doesn’t Suck Article)

March 13, 2015 by Leave a Comment

The article I posted earlier today did not have a working link to the article I was criticizing. My apologies for the mistake. The original article has been fixed so that the link works. You can also read the article I was criticizing here.

 

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Beer News (Aug 27–Sept 24)

September 24, 2014 by Leave a Comment

BWJlogoAs usual, let’s start with some “listicles,” articles in the form of a list. Recently, GQ listed the best 50 craft beers as picked by experts. Who these mysterious experts were, they didn’t say. Next, here’s a beer list — 5 non-pumpkin beers for fall. The internet is filled with best beer lists, but this is the first list I’ve ever seen that collects beers that will activate your gag reflex. (I’ve actually tried the Belgian mustard beer and was pretty good. Interesting, but good.) Next, here is a list of 6 ways to incorporate beer into your desserts. And speaking of adding beer to things, Starbucks is testing a stout-flavored coffee.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Beer News, Uncategorized

Do Clone Recipes Produce Clone Brews?

September 11, 2014 by 8 Comments
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Cloned sheep

There are an abundance of homebrew clone recipes in the homebrewing literature. (We even have a couple on our site. See the links at the bottom of this article.) These purport to give you a recipe that will produce a beer that tastes like the commercial example. But can you really brew a clone brew by following a homebrew clone recipe?

The short answer is that it is highly unlikely. I am not saying this to be needlessly contrarian, nor to disparage the skills of homebrewers. It’s simply is a fact that a clone brew recipe is highly unlikely to produce an exact clone of its intended brew. However, if we carefully examine why this is, we can get on the path to actually brewing a very respectable clone brew – if that’s what we wish — or simply to become better homebrewers who are more aware of the sources of variation in beer.

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Filed Under: Brewed For Thought, Uncategorized Tagged With: ,

Five Habits of Successful Brewers

August 8, 2014 by 4 Comments

gold-number-5Brewing decent, drinkable beer is fairly easy. Brewing the highest quality beer is somewhat more difficult. Previously, I’ve posted a variety of articles with specific suggestions on how to brew the best quality beer at home. Today I’m going to look at a more nebulous aspect of becoming a successful brewer — your mindset.

The successful brewers I’ve met — both homebrewers and commercial brewers — are a diverse lot. However, they share a set of traits related to how they view their beer and their brewing skills. Hopefully, I can do this without venturing too far into phoney-baloney “motivational poster” territory. Personally, I think the “de-motivational posters” are much funnier. So with that in mind, here are the five habits of successful brewers.

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Beer News (May 19–25)

May 27, 2014 by Leave a Comment

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OK, let’s start with a “listicle” (an article that’s basically just a list) that tells us what we want to hear — the health benefits of beer. And here’s a listicle I missed (a missticle?) from April, somebody’s list of the best cities for beer. And dude, I totally agree with you. [Your town] should have made the list. I mean, what were they thinking?

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Different Yeast Strains Yield Different IBUs

February 18, 2014 by 13 Comments
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Dr. White, speaking at the Dixie Cup in Houston last year.

Late last year, I attended the Dixie Cup in Houston. One of the speakers was Dr. Chris White, the founder of White Labs Yeast. He spoke about several things White Labs was doing, including opening a tasting room, but for me the most interesting part of his talk involved some experiments with yeast strains and IBUs.

White and his staff made up a standard wort, with a known (calculated) level of bitterness, and fermented aliquots of it with each of the White Labs strains. Each beer was then analyzed for its actual level of bitterness (in IBUs). He then compared the measured IBUs to the predicted IBUs for each strain. If the two were equal, the beer was given a score of 1. If the measured IBUs were less than the predicted IBUs, the beer received a score between zero and one. For example, if the beer was expected to have 100 IBUs, but only had 80, the beer would be given a 0.8. (Note: the experiment wasn’t done with 100 IBU beers, I just used that number as an example because it’s easy to see how the proportions worked out.) And if the beer was more bitter than predicted, the beer received a number over 1.

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Filed Under: Brewing Ingredients, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,

Beer News (Jan 28–Feb 9)

February 12, 2014 by 2 Comments

BWJlogoI’ll start this compilation of beer news with some science. Popular Science published an article describing the differences between a lager  and an ale, complete with a mini-review of the origins of lager yeast.

Are you thinking of starting a brewery? Here is what current brewers wished they knew about opening a brewery. You’d have competition, but according to the website Perfect Pint, not as much as some sources claim.

No week in beer news is complete without some sort of list, so here’s a list of breakfast beers. Think of them as fermented Grape Nuts.

Also, it’s been cold here in the US recently. How cold was it? It was so cold, railroad workers had to work extra hard to ensure trainloads of beer didn’t freeze. 

[Read more…]

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