Blog entries

Just Getting to the Store was Difficult

Richard Bolster — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:45:19 +0100

The joys of fatherhood far outweigh the drawbacks but, man;
sometimes kids get in the way of the simplest errand!

Brewday was scheduled and I couldn’t miss it. Actually, in my house, it’s brew
night. With an inquisitive four-year-old and a toddling one-year-old, brewing at night is not only a lot
easier, it’s really my only option. Plus, because my wife works restaurant
hours, finding time to brew can be challenging. I have to identify my brewing
windows early and hope that nothi...

Year Two

Jamil Zainasheff — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 20:45:41 +0100

So, one year of blog entries down. Normally I need to think
long and hard about committing to another year of writing anything, but these
blog entries are different for me. I get to say just about anything I want. I
get to ramble on about random thoughts, and as long as the topic somehow
relates to beer, everyone seems to be OK with it. Cool gig, huh?

But don’t take that as an indication that I don’t care. I
really do speak from the heart when I write these things (albeit, with a pint...

Fun Times Three (Belgian Tripel)

Chris Colby — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 21:03:09 +0100

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.

Last year, I was lucky enough to tour the Westmalle brewery in Belgium. Westmalle brews a tripel -- in fact, may have been the first brewery to ...

Hefe Obsessed

Richard Bolster — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 16:19:04 +0100

It's been about a year now. I'm trying to control it, but
with little success. What "it" is is an obsession with brewing a
decent hefeweizen. I'm determined to get it right. But I keep getting it wrong.

I decided hefeweizen should be my first attempt at designing
my own homebrew recipe. I can't recall why. Why not start with a more
straightforward beer, or yeast, for that matter? I think I was drinking a lot of
weissbier when I thought, "THIS is wh...

The Sum of the Parts

Jamil Zainasheff — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 16:02:51 +0100

Over the past year or so I’ve lost five friends. About one
every two or three months and it sucks. I don’t want to bring you down, but
every so often I think about those friends and what they meant to me.

I know
that the person I am is a sum of the people that I have called friends (and I
guess the few that I might call enemies too). Those experiences, those people,
made me the person I am today. The beautiful parts of my personality along with
those gross, nasty, stinky part...

Getting to know me

Richard Bolster — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 19:09:08 +0100

I am a novice home brewer. There I said it. I am attempting to get better. Really that’s the crux. I have brewed off an on for about a decade but can’t seem to crawl out of the beginning stages of my brewing career. I’ve brewed some decent beers – beginners luck turned my first ever brew, a hopped up Pale ale, into my all-time favorite beer. But I’ve also brewed some duds and encountered some really strange outcomes – including an oddly sour hefeweizen – I ...

Life After UC Davis: Weeks 55-68

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 16:14:50 +0100

I’m sure everyone that is old to enough to ride a bicycle has been subjected to the overused cliche that patience is a virtue dozens, if not hundreds of times. During the last 3 months of 2011 I got a chance to test this time honored theory out. My hiatus from this blog during the holiday season was indeed intentional, as I did not want to burden you with the tedious details about the roadblocks we were dealing with trying to get this brewery going. Now that we have en...

New BYO/BBR experiment

Chris Colby — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 22:39:31 +0100

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.

Experiment 1 -- How does trub in the fermenter affect your beer?

For homebrewers who use immersion chillers, after boiling and chilling wort, they must transfer it to their fermenter. (If a plate chiller or counterflow chiller ...

The Three IPA Lunch

Jamil Zainasheff — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 17:24:40 +0100

"The three-martini lunch is the epitome of American
efficiency. Where else can you get an earful, a bellyful and a snootful at the
same time?" -- President Gerald R Ford

As a kid, back in the 1970s, I remember hearing about the “three
martini lunch” for the first time. I couldn’t imagine how drinking could be
part of a business meeting. How could you keep your head and make rational
business decisions if you were half in the bag? By the time I was an adult in
corpor...

Half a Bag of Common Sense

Jamil Zainasheff — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 21:36:59 +0100

People who have known me as a homebrewer for a long time
often ask me what I think of professional brewing.

“Honestly,” I say to them, “brewing
is pretty much brewing. The challenge is on the business side of things.” I
find myself spending more time focused on spreadsheets than brew logs these
days. Professional or homebrewing, you make wort, ferment it and then package
it. The only reason professional brewing is different from high-end homebrewing
is the added challenge of ...

Beer Here and Beer There

Chris Colby — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 20:44:27 +0100

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

Beer Here (Austin, Texas)

I went to the Austin ZEALOTS' (my homebrew club's) Christmas party this weekend. It's been a good year to be a ZEALOT and we had a great party to celebrate. Our Primary Fermenter, Corey Martin, and his wife, Angela, host the party every year at their house in Round Rock.

For the past several years (eight now?), there has also been a chili cook-off associated with pa...

The Mighty Heave-Ho!

Jamil Zainasheff — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 18:08:49 +0100

As I mentioned before, I knew distributing beer would be
hard work and I wanted to sign up with distributors as soon as possible.

It is
not difficult to find distributors that are willing to work with new craft
breweries. There are lots of newer, smaller distributors out there and the only
way they can afford to take on new product lines is to sign them up as soon as
the brewery starts producing beer. But the distribution business is like any
other business; there are good co...

Test Batch at South Austin Brewing

Chris Colby — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 21:05:02 +0100

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).

South Austin’s brewery is almost complete, but we brewed 10 gallons on his homebrew rig, not on the brewery&rsq...

The Passion and the Perfection

Jamil Zainasheff — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 17:19:08 +0100

Most brewers will tell you that attending the Great American
Beer Festival is one of the highlights of the year for them. It is a big
spectacle of beer, brewers, and beer lovers. It is something for every beer
geek’s bucket list.

I’ve attended GABF a number of times in different
capacities. First as a member of the American Homebrewer’s Association
Governing Committee. Another time as a Pro/Am entrant. Later I attended as an
author, to sign books for Brewer’s Publications. Oth...

Visit to Jester King

Chris Colby — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 01:25:43 +0100

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 Countr...

Living the Dream

Jamil Zainasheff — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 20:40:56 +0100

Living the Dream

I received an email from a homebrewer dreaming of becoming a
commercial brewer and he asked, “How late is too late for a determined fool to
chase an old dream?”

My answer to him was that it is never too late to follow
your dream. The moment you stop pursuing your dreams, you might as well be
dead. That is absolutely true and I will always stand by that claim. You should
always live life and make of it what you can. But I can’t help but mention the
fli...

A good day to be a Viking, or . . .

Chris Colby — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 15:56:17 +0100

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.

This weekend, my wife and I went to the Dixie Cup. The Dixie Cup is the annual conference of the ...

Winning, Belgium and Science

Chris Colby — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 13:38:04 +0100

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 next few weeks, I will be blogging about my recent trip to Belgium. BYO's publisher (Brad Ring) took me and our advertising driector (Kiev Rattee) to the Brussels area in early August and we visited some interes...

Fortes Fortuna Adiuvat

Jamil Zainasheff — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 18:42:39 +0100

I’ve always wondered what the secret is to creating a
successful brewery.

By success I don’t mean the place stays open and you are
able to pay everyone minimum wage. I want to know what separates the modestly
successful from the wildly successful. As much as it pains me to say it, I’m
not certain beer quality is the differentiator. Yes, a certain high level of
quality is needed to be wildly successful, but there are high quality beers
being made from some less successful brew...

Life After UC Davis: Weeks 47-54

Justin Burnsed — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 18:33:11 +0100

I know I can’t speak for everyone that brews their own beer as to why they do it. Having said that, I’m willing to bet more than half of us do it for the creative “let’s see what happens when I do this” aspect. There are so many variables that have an affect on the final outcome of a beer, it’s almost mind boggling. But that’s what makes it so cool right?

Before brewing anything for my new employer, one of the vari...