It's been awhile since I've updated my blog, so here's a rundown on what I've been up to.

I judged a couple flights at this year's Austin ZEALOTS Homebrew Inquisition. This is my homebrew club's competition. I was on the panel for this year's special category, which was "Viagra beers." These were wood-aged beers and there were a couple that were very good. I also judged meads, and therefore got to taste the mead that ended up winning best of show.

A couple weeks later, at the annual ZEALOTs picnic, they announced the winners of the Inquisition. One of my beers won a silver medal. My winner was "Dethbier," which I entered in the Big and Boozy category. (The Inquisition is not a BJCP-sanctioned event.) Dethbier was really a bottle of BYO's 10th Anniversary Ale that I brewed back in 2005. I've still got a few bottles left and it has aged into an amazing complex beer.

A few weeks after that, I spoke at the Alamo City Cervezafest. I gave a talk on designing homebrew experiments, which reminded me of my planned continuous vs. batch sparging experiment that I haven't started yet. During the talk, I made one offhand reference to growing hops in Bastrop and most of the question and answer period revolved around growing hops in Texas. I was surprised at the number of hop growers in the room and we had a really good discussion of the challenges of growing hops in the south. We spoke about the heat, differences in day length and the need for some experimentation to be done to figure out how to grow quality hops down here. (Growing hops is no problem, getting cones that don't smell grassy is.) Luckily, a couple of the growers were interested in experimenting. (I'll probably delve into this in later blog entries, especially next year, as I had a number of ideas.)

Speaking of growing hops, my bines did well this year and I've harvested some Northern Brewer, Chinook, Centennial and Cascade hops. Some of the hops were harvested during the hottest part of the summer and had a very grassy aroma to them. I'll probably use these as bittering hops (and hope the grassy aroma boils off).

The hops I harvested later seemed, from their aroma, to be of much higher quality. I attributed this to the cooler weather. Next year, I am going to try to delay many of my hops so they "ripen" during mid-September (or later) rather than mid-August or earlier. (In the South, you can sometimes get hop cones as early as June. This year I had a few vines that set a full crop in early summer, then set a second crop after the first was picked.) I am going to split some rhizomes and do a side-by-side comparison of the same variety, split from the same rhizome, grown under the same conditions and see if late, cooler-maturing hops are of higher quality.

I also plan on planting some barley in November to see if I can get it to mature before the severe heat of summer. (I'm also also still planning on fermenting a beer inside a watermelon, but none of my melons were big enough this year. They were bigger than last year, but still not big enough. I pretty sure I'll get there this coming year.)

Other than tending my hops - and ignoring my blog - one thing I have been doing is editing Brew Your Own's Hop Lover's Guide, a special issue due out sometime in mid-October. I'm biased, of course, but I think it'll be a great resource for homebrewers. One cool thing we did was provide several charts of every known hop variety sorted by alpha acid levels, beta acid levels, cohumulone content and oil content, plus a chart that gives substitution options. There are chapters of hop chemistry, using hops in the brewhouse, calculating IBUs, hopping tips expressly for extract brewers and growing hops at home . . . oh, and a lot of recipes.

I realize that this is a brewing blog and the one thing I didn't discuss was any actual brewing. I hope to rectify that situation this coming weekend.