Given the relative success of the first batch of this single hop APA project, and given that I hadn’t done any brewing at home since the Roggenbier in July, it seemed like a good opportunity to make a batch of straightforward-but-delicious pale ale for home consumption. 1 And given my recent excitement for New Zealand […]
BJCP study group session number 10 convened around the Category 4 beers. But there was a little bit of a cliffhanger going into it as some last-minute shuffling happened when our scheduled coordinator had to back out. Nevertheless, we’re a scrappy and resourceful bunch, and we pulled it off with a complete complement.
Filed under “Best Laid Plans” and/or “Improvising” — our ninth study group session, intended for Category 19 (and coordinated by yours truly) got re-purposed, more or less at the last minute, for a… very special training session: Judging the 2017 GMM Style Challenge beers: 20C. Imperial Stout
At the confluence of my homebrewing and BJCP study group work, I found that I needed to deepen my knowledge of raw ingredients. Because hops are de rigueur pretty much all the time, I feel like I’ve gotten fairly well-acquainted with a number of varietals. And I spent most of my 2016 brew sessions experimenting […]
Filed under: How do I get myself into these things? It started when the local homebrew club reached out to me for help setting up an event for AHA’s Mead Day. The general idea was to do a club event that talked a bit about mead, demonstrated mead making, and then a little Q&A. It […]
For the past two weeks, you have been at a creative writing retreat at your alma mater, St. Mary’s College of Maryland. The time spent was very productive. New stories written. Old ones revised. New friends made. Old connections reunited. But the time has come to depart. As you close your first suitcase and return […]
As part of my quest to become a BJCP certified beer judge, I signed up to steward the 2017 Champlain Valley Fair Homebrew Competition on August 26, 2017. I hadn’t seen a competition in situ before, and I believe it would be useful to see how the events are organized and run. Further, I could […]
For better or worse, our eighth study session (for Category 12) was feeling a little bit… improv. A little bit fast and loose. Or as Erin put it: Really great discussions and tastings at tonight’s BJCP Study Group. Sort of a weird, random, catch-all category (Pale Commonwealth Beer), punctuated by a finale of “…and this […]
Where do we begin when we tell the story of this single hop Calypso IPL? The obvious place would be “at the beginning” — but I’m not sure where that is. Originally, Calypso was a candidate for my “Prosody” single hop project (see also: Homebrew #33: Prosody (El Dorado)). But I had this nagging feeling […]
Blame Aaron. A Facebook thread talking through which “new” and/or “interesting” hops to showcase in an up-coming brew spawned not one but two big brew days. On the one hand: Calypso; and on the other… Humulus lupulus var. neomexicanus — the wild North American varietal otherwise known as Medusa.