Perhaps because I live in such a wonderland of New England IPAs, I’d never felt a burning desire to make one. Don’t get me wrong, the challenge itself is tempting — but only 4-ish years and 75 brews into the hobby, there are still so many challenges to choose from! However, when the opportunity to […]
People kept telling me that making cider was the easiest thing in the world. (“Easier than making mead?” I’d ask.) Apparently this is true. And if I hadn’t been so stubborn about it, I would have made my batch much earlier. On the left? Literal Fidelity. On the right? Witty Pome.
Brewing a big ol’ barleywine is a homebrewing right of passage, right? Something you simply must attempt at some point? And so here was my first stab at it — Extinction Event:
The second 1 in this “junk drawer” series of “leftover ingredient” beers. After the (relative) success of #1, I looked in on what odds-and-ends were kicking around and applied my imagination toward Hoarder Intervention #2. Arguably third, if you count Younger Sister.[↩]
A style that wasn’t really on my radar until I started studying for the BJCP exam was the (4B) Festbier. I cannot imagine that I’d never had one before, but I also must believe that I’d always either conflated it somehow with either a Märzen or a Helles (Bock?) 1 when trying to place it […]
Like I said last year: “How do I get myself into these things?” Except… now I know how I get myself into these. As a back-to-back Vermont Mead Maker of the Year, I feel like it’s my responsibility to get out there and demo the art for people. In the year 2018, the Mead Day […]
A project I’d long considered since making that first batch: a little honey and a little grape must gets you a pyment. And that’s what gives us Partial Shade:
Not really sure what to say about this one. I did a completely unrelated gear experiment 1 earlier in the day, and rather than waste the 5 gallons of 100+°F water… well, I could whip up some kind of mead in a half hour or so. And it felt like it was getting late but […]
Given the success of the first batch (second place Saison in the 2018 Greg Noonan Competition), I was determined to dial in my grisette recipe. Taking the feedback from the judges, and a little more speculative process tweaks from Markowski’s book, I applied those here to make Green Mountain Grisette (Mk. II):
Going way back to before I had any idea of what I was doing 1, I got it into my head to make a red-as-possible Trappist-style ale. Something in the neighborhood of a Dubbel in terms of color (but redder) but closer to a Belgian Dark Strong in terms of strength and flirting with both […]