Homebrew Adventures
Homebrew: The artful practice of brewing one's own beverages at home, allowing for creativity, experimentation, and the satisfaction of crafting unique flavours.
I'm not sure I'd call what I do artful exactly, but there is something deeply satisfying about making your own alcohol and I highly recommend it.
AG14 - Pete's Porter
Having got pretty comfortable with my Coffee Stout (which after much soul-searching I've started calling a Coffee Porter instead), I decided that I should really try and produce a 'natural' porter. While I love my coffee beers, sometimes you just want a beer flavoured beer - besides, for some strange reason I find the ...
AG13 - Hop Panic!
This story has two rather contradictory morals to it, but they're both equally valuable lessons. Moral 1: Plan Ahead I started out with the intention of re-making my previously successful #IPADay, because it's a lovely beer and my store of the previous batch was running low. The brew day started out well enough, and the grain ...
AG12 – Bramling Best
It's all very well brewing fancy IPAs and delicious Coffee Porters, but the one thing my homebrew cupboard was missing was a good session bitter. I also had an alarming quantity of Bramling Cross hops from the garden. When I bought myself a hop plant, I didn't really appreciate the volume of hops that a ...
A Brew Day In A Brewery
I've been a home brewer for quite a while now, and I've always been pretty pleased with the results – it's always come out tasting like beer (without that odd homebrew tang that I got back in my "beer in a bag" days at university), and when I've given it to other people ...
AG9 – Cupboard Ale
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 a rather rash promise to make some beer especially for my friend Dave's party. Now, I've let people try my home brew before ...
AG8 – #IPADay Version 2
Last year, I almost accidentally mademy #IPADay. Not that I didn't mean to make beer – that would be impressive even by my standards – but that I didn't really know what I was making until I'd made it, and didn't even realise IPA Day existed before I was bottling it! I've always suspected ...
AG7 – Coffee Stout
In the approach to Christmas, it seemed time to make another dark beer. Last year's Christmas Ale was an interesting experiment, but the spicing was a little odd so this year I decided to make something a little more conventional and that smelt slightly less like Dr. Pepper. However, as it's boring to make something ...
AG6 – Hop Harvest
This year, there seems to have been an explosion in making 'green hop beers' – just about every brewery you look at seems to be making a special beer with the first hops of the season, straight from the bine. Having planted my first hop plant this spring, I wasn't really expecting to ...
AG5 – #IPADay
On previous occasions, I've started my brewdays with a vision of the beer I was trying to create. They haven't always turned out to plan, but I have at least had something specific in mind. This brew was something of an exception. All I'd decided on was something slightly autumnal, and that it would ...Bottling Blues
I tend to bottle all my homebrew beer, for the simple reason that as the only member of our household that actually likes beer it's hard to drink an entire cask before the beer goes off. The massive downside of this is that bottling beer is by far the most tedious part of ...