Having got pretty comfortable with my Coffee Stout (which after much soul-searching I've started calling a Coffee Porter instead), I decided thatI should really try and produce a 'natural' porter. WhileI love my coffee beers, sometimes you just want a beerflavoured beer - besides, for some strange reason I find the ...
This story has two rather contradictory morals to it, but they're both equally valuable lessons. Moral 1: Plan Ahead I started out withthe intention of re-making my previously successful #IPADay, because it's alovely beer and my store of the previous batch was runninglow. The brew day started out well enough, and the grain ...
It's all very well brewing fancy IPAs and delicious Coffee Porters, but the one thing my homebrew cupboard was missing was agood session bitter. I also had an alarming quantity of BramlingCross hops from the garden. When I bought myself a hopplant, I didn't really appreciate the volume of hops that a ...
I've been a home brewer for quite a while now, and I've always been pretty pleased with the results – it'salways come out tasting like beer (without that odd homebrew tangthat I got back in my "beer in a bag"days at university), and when I've given it to other people ...
A few months ago, sat in a field outside a train station at the Reading Beer Festival (which, for the record,is my favourite beer festival in the country) I made arather rash promise to make some beer especially for myfriend Dave's party. Now, I've let people try my home brew before ...
Last year, I almost accidentally mademy #IPADay. Not that I didn't mean to make beer – that would be impressive evenby my standards – but that I didn't really know whatI was making until I'd made it, and didn't even realiseIPA Day existed before I was bottling it! I've always suspected ...
In the approach to Christmas, it seemed time to make another dark beer. Last year's Christmas Ale was an interesting experiment, butthe spicing was a little odd so this year Idecided to make something a little more conventional and that smeltslightly less like Dr. Pepper. However, as it's boring to make something ...
This year, there seems to have been an explosion in making 'green hop beers' – just about every brewery you lookat seems to be making a special beer with the firsthops of the season, straight from the bine. Having planted myfirst hop plant this spring, I wasn't really expecting to ...
On previous occasions, I've started my brewdays with a vision of the beer I was trying to create. They haven't alwaysturned out to plan, but I have at least had somethingspecific in mind. This brew was something of an exception. AllI'd decided on was something slightly autumnal, and that it would ...
I tend to bottle all my homebrew beer, for the simple reason that as the only member of our household thatactually likes beer it's hard to drink an entire cask beforethe beer goes off. The massive downside of this isthat bottling beer is by far the most tedious part of ...
