Category: BEER & HOMEBREWING

The Home Brewer’s Guide to Vintage Beer by Ron Pattison

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This entry is part 40 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

As always, I’m posting this a while after actually finishing the book. Supposedly, I read this book a few years ago… but I don’t really remember doing so. Perhaps that’s the result of sleep-deprivation, since the time when I (supposedly) read it, my son was very young. In any case, I thought I’d get a refresher on English beers, and this fall I might brew up a few of them.  I’m without the two brewing books I used to find most useful and/or inspiring while planning out my brewing, what that was a more frequent pursuit: Ray Daniels’ Designing Great …

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Back to Brewing (Kinda)

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Years ago, I was an avid homebrewer. Then I moved someplace hot, where it wasn’t really practical to brew, and when we moved back to Korea, one thing after another prevented me getting back to it. (At first, it was just money and having a new kid; then it was the shoddy electrical system in our apartment, and the fact I was focusing on writing and parenting.) But finally I am brewing again… and, unsurprisingly, part of the motivation is my son: I proposed a trade to my friend, whose kids had outgrown their LEGOS—a batch of beer for the …

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Wait for Me, Day 21

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This entry is part 21 of 23 in the series Playing "Wait for Me"

This is an entry in a journaling game I’m currently playing. An explanation, and my first entry, is here. Oh, and these posts are organized into a series now. You can see the post series page here.  (I haven’t abandoned this—especially not so near the end of the game! I just wanted to do the entries justice, and well, life’s been busy. There’s one more entry in the game, which I’ll get posted this week, and then I’ll post my thoughts on the game as a whole.)

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Wait for Me, Day 20

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This entry is part 20 of 23 in the series Playing "Wait for Me"

This is an entry in a journaling game I’m currently playing. An explanation, and my first entry, is here. Oh, and these posts are organized into a series now. You can see the post series page here.  (I haven’t abandoned this—especially not so near the end of the game—I just wanted to do the entries justice and have had a lot on my plate the past week.)

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Johnny Appleseed, Apple Genetics, and Burnt Orchards

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One of the podcasts I listen to quite a bit is Stuff You Missed in History Class. They recently ran a “classic” episode demystifying the life of Johnny Appleseed, as John Chapman has become known.  Now, all I really knew about him was from the Disney cartoon and one volume about the man in the Value Tales books. (Remember those? The one about him was titled The Value of Love.) Given that, I found it surprisingly interesting, though it turns out it’s pretty hard to demystify the life of someone about whom a lot of stuff has been made up… and who …

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Strange Brews

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Some beer news, since I haven’t posted anything in ages. It’s now been four years since I’ve made any beer myself, though I am hoping to get a Saison brewed before the end of summer. (It’s hot enough for it, after all!)  But this is a news news post, since there’s been some odd and interesting brewing-related pieces in the news.

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S. eubayanus found in Tibet! (Er, in 2014?!?!)

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So, back in 2011 I mentioned the discovery of S. eubayanus in the wild in Patagonia. That’s exciting because S. pastorianus (often called “lager yeast” in English: it’s the yeast used to make a lot what the world recognizes as “beer” today, for better or worse) is actually a hybrid of two other kinds of yeast: that is, it was formed when two different kinds of yeast contributed DNA to a hybrid yeast. Those two yeasts were S. cerevisae (familiar as top-fermenting brewer’s yeast, but in fermenting other alcohols and making bread as well), and an until-recently mysterious, never-before isolated strain that got called S. eubayanus. The latter yeast was …

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