Category: BEER & HOMEBREWING

The Compleat Meadmaker by Ken Schramm

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Those who know me personally know that my passions tend to kind of take over. When I am interested in something, it begins to occupy a big part of my mind. I think about it a lot. I talk about it a lot. Those who know me are used to it, I suspect. Hanging out with a homebrewer can be something like hanging out with a writer of the talky kind. I have friends who are writers of the non-talky kind, the sort who seem to feel that talking about their current projects is a way of abandoning the project …

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Melomel, or Hot Pepper Pilsner? Why Not Both?

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So, I just finished racking my chocolate stout over a good 3.5 kilos of bing cherries in syrup and about 2/3rds of a bottle of cacao liqueur, plus some dried cocoa powder. It’s going to start fermenting again, which is going to be interesting since the carboy is almost full. I need to check the blowoff tube every few hours once the fermentation restarts, because if enough cherry bits get into the tube to block it, then the carboy could explode and even if it didn’t kill me, it’d mean a humungous mess. Anyway, no worries to be had — …

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New Brew: Cherry Chocolate Stout

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Probably not of interest to anyone who isn’t a brewer too, but I haven’t yet gone into the system to segment this category away from the front page of the blog. Bear with me, folks, the days are all too short. But I figure it’s a good idea I start tracking my brewing. My friend Charles showed me his bread-baking diary, where he records all his recipes and trials and so on, and it struck me as a great idea for brewing. If I ever want to replicate something, this will be the place to look. And those who are …

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Wild Brews: Beer Beyond the Influence of Brewer’s Yeast by Jeff Sparrow

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Wild Brews is a wonderful little book that deals specifically with the wild-fermented beers in the Belgian tradition — that is, Lambic (and various subtypes and blends like Framboise, Gueuze, Kriek, and so on) and the Flanders Ales. Anyone who is even a little experienced in homebrewing is going to at least be intimidated by the idea of brewing a lambic. Most of us make beer happily knowing that the fruits of our labours will be drinkable in a month or two, six months at the most in many cases — it’s a rare beer that takes a year to …

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Brewer’s Glee

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Well, I got a few things in the past week that are bound to lead to brewer’s glee — that state in which someone who makes beer at home finds himself gleefully laughing at all the wonderful things he’s going to be able to do. One was a shipment of goodies — some of them brewing related, some not — from Miss Jiwaku, especially including a bunch of Indonesia “gula” I left behind at her suggestion. “Gula” is sugar, but not the kind of thing one who’s grown up in whitebread Canada thinks of at the word. It’s unrefined stuff, …

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새해복많이받으세요, & Bread & Beer

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In other words, Happy Korean New Year! (And yeah, they got it from the Chinese. Whatever.) Me, I’m stuffed with rice cake and dumpling soup, and am now having having a nice Leffe Blond, which brings back memories of Montréal. (Not my favorite beer, now, as it was then, but then, it was my first beer, followed by Sleeman’s Honey Brown Lager, Guinness, Harp, and whatever else I could afford. It took till my second year in Montreal to arrive at beer; the first year was taken up with red wine. Which is to segue gracelessly to the fact that …

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