Belgian beers have a reputation for being somewhat hops-negligent. However, that reputation is absolutely unjustified. Please meet a beer that was once described to the author as the “King of the Belgian and French styles,” the Bière de Garde.
The Vienna lager lands in a place where it’s toastier than pale German lagers but nowhere near the caramel and melanoidin-heavy richness of “modern” Oktoberfest. The best examples of Vienna lager are like drinking a liquid version of dry toast.
Not all dark beers—and most especially not all dark lagers—are the same. Take some time to parse the different dark lager styles out there and consider not only how they differ but also how we can modify our brewing approaches to produce them.
While some think of beers as being either lagers or ales, there is a third category: hybrids. Let's examine how the beers in this category differ from each other but also how we can make recipe and/or process changes to make them the best they can be.
American Brown Ale is a classic of the early craft and homebrewing world, and in a perfect world, you’d have a great version of it on tap at all times.
In the strictest sense of the word, honey ales don’t have a “style.” In the 2015 BJCP Style Guidelines, they probably best fall into category 31B, Alternative Sugar Beer, assuming that honey is the only specialty ingredient used.
Brewing coffee beer isn’t hard—which isn’t to say that it’s as simple as throwing beans into the mash! Pick a good bean, incorporate it conscientiously, and you can turn almost any beer into a coffee beer. Here's a recipe for a coffee stout.
While some think of the Ordinary Bitter as nothing more than a bland, low-ABV, thin-bodied ale, at its best, it’s one of the better drinking beers around!
Updating your brewery can be one of the healthiest things you can do, says Josh Weikert, as he leads you on a walk-through of a prospective system-reboot process that will enable you to get the most out of the time you spend brewing.
It’s the second-largest ingredient in your beer by weight, and yet many brewers are content to keep uncritically plugging away at brewing with grains that were bred and designed to satisfy the needs of large breweries. That is beginning to change.