I brewed a Belgian-style tripel on Friday and had a great time for at least three reasons: 1.) My friend Dan Dewberry came over and brewed with me. 2.) This was my first brewday of 2012 and 3.) Everything went extremely well. 

James Spencer and I are happy to announce the next in our series of Brew Your Own/Basic Brewing Radio collaborative experiments. We have two experiments this time, and you can participate in both (or either) by simply brewing a single batch of beer. 

This is blog entry about drinking beer here, and drinking beer there. 

Last Friday, I helped brew a batch of homebrew inside a soon-to-be-opened commercial brewery. My friend (and fellow Austin ZEALOT) Ed Peters, who will be the brewer at South Austin, invited me to brew a test batch of beer. We made an amber-colored ale (about 20° Plato/OG 1.080), which Ed pitched with Belgian Abbey yeast (Wyeast 1214). 

Last Saturday, my wife and I went to Jester King’s Funk’n Sour Gravity Fest out at their brewery on the west side of Austin. That day, the brewery was serving soured versions of some their beers. Most of the soured version were aged in oak barrels with added microbes to sour the beer. Jester King uses “commercial” strains of bacteria, plus some microbes they’ve harvested at their brewery. To do that, they exposed fresh wort to the Texas Hill Country air and let the mixed culture grow. They then sent samples off to a lab to be examined and have the more promising bacterial strains isolated and cultured for them. Of their soured beers, my favorite was the oak-aged Commercial Suicide (a 3.6% ABV English dark mild). 

When things were going well, the former president of my undergraduate institution (Augustana College, Sioux Falls SD) used to say, “It’s a good day to be a Viking.” (In case you're wondering, he wasn't insane, Vikings were our mascot.) This weekend, it was good to be a Viking . . . although not for any reasons associated with my alma mater. 

Congratulations to Corey Martin, of my homebrewing club the Austin ZEALOTS, for winning this year's Sam Adams Longshot contest. Corey's beer — a Munich dunkel — will be brewed commercially by Sam Adams and be a part of this year's Longshot mixed 6-pack. 

[In the September 2011 issue of BYO, we published a story on new malts. As part of that story (on page 39), I wrote a sidebar on barley farming and malt prices. This is an extended version of that sidebar. ]

These days, big beers are all the rage. There are double and imperial versions of many beer styles and many big beers are also aged in oak barrels, including bourbon barrels. The craft beer drinking public loves these brews, if the rankings on Beer Advocate and Rate Beer are any indication and there are times when nothing other than a big, bold beer will do. 

Drinking Beer for Science