learn about beer

Beer info comic.

Ale festival is on my calender for tomorrow. I’m sure I’ll learn something.

Most pumpkin beers don’t have any pumpkin in them, just the associated spices!

I think I’m loosing my sense of taste. I can no longer identify a hoppy beer. ‘Tis very strange. It’s happened a few times in the last couple weeks.

On Sunday and drank and majorly enjoyed a Drifter Pale Ale by Widmer. I identified it was a fruity beer (possibly apricot) and was shocked when boyfriend described it is hoppy with a little citrus flavor. Reading up on it I see it has no fruit and is commonly described as hoppy.

This could have a serious impact on my beer expert dreams.

i know some about beer, i took a class in college and aced it. im not joking either, i got credit for it, i was in the beer club and everything. but ive forgotten some of it and gone back to cheap beer because that is what my budget allows. i want to get back into good beer. i live in denver and there are tons of microbrews here. i just want to appreciate it again.

Did some more reading up about kegging beer last night. I realized/remembered why I thought it was out of my league. I have a keg now, but still need another $100+ in equipment to keg my beer. I’m going to stick with bottles for a while…
Also last night I made beer by myself for the first time ever.

Last night I read up about Oktoberfest. Turns out we were supposed to brew our Oktoberfest been in March, not September. Oh well. Also Oktoberfest beers are typically lagers, I’d thought ales.

My friend at work gave me a keg for my going away gift! I’m going to invite him over when I use it the first time. Maybe a nice beer for Thanksgiving time!

I feel like this is done. I just finished Brew Chem 101 and today was browsing through a beer magazine and couldn’t really find anything new. Of course I still have a lot to gain about beer styles, but I now have the basics down. Way down.

Lets look at my original goals and see how if I can call this done.

• start keeping a log of the different beers I try and some information about them. This should help me discover what I like the best and what I want to try to replicate with my own brewing. Honestly, I just don’t want to do this.

• Read my whole homebrew book front to back, even the sections for experts and flag pages and highlight key things.

• Read at least a couple other books. Read Brew Chem 101 and lots of The Encyclopedia of Beer and several beer guides. Also have a subscription to Beer NW magazine and occasionally pick up other mags.

• Try to tour at least one big commercial brewery and one microbrewery or brewpub. (I did tour the Olympia Brewery when I was about 7 years old, but I don’t think that counts!) – I toured the Full Sail Brewery and still want to tour a smaller one.

• Get comfortable in the homebrew store, talk to the guys that work there and soak up all their knowledge.

• Make at least 3 different kinds of beer, be able to understand what makes each unique and identify the flavors and other qualities that separate them and how those are influenced by technique and ingredients. I’ve made 5 different beers so far

• Keg at least once.

Not bad. I want to add to this:

• Get the beer style guide and read it for each beer style that I brew.

• Take a beer evaluation class (this is a pipe dream)

• Volunteer at a beer festival

lots of info here

I’m listening to a show about the science of beer on Talk of the Nation right now. So far its all stuff I already know, so I’m proud of my knowledge base.

We brewed some amber ale, drank some homebrew and some raspberry wheat beer (not homemade).

I learned that I’ve been mis-using the word “sparge”.
I learned that brewing gets easier each time. Its pretty much stress free now. (Hope bottling day goes so well.)
I learned what seems to be the right ratios of boiling wort, chilled water and very chilled water such that the yeast can be pitched right away without cooling time.
And I taught someone about brewing!

I went on a brewery tour today. It was fun, but less informative than I’d hoped. Being a Sunday, they weren’t actually brewing when we went through, and I’d wanted to see the bottling line in action. And the whole thing was explained at a very high level, not as much detail as I expected.
It was cool to see that the steps in a brewery are essentially the same steps for home brewing.