For once, forget about planning every little detail and trying to dial everything in. (How often does that work, anyway?) Have fun, throw together some under-loved ingredients, and brew yourself a monster.
Brewed once per year at Urban Chestnut’s brewery in Wolnzach, in the heart of Bavaria’s hop-growing Hallertau region, here is a homebrew-scale recipe for the strong, malty, mahogany-colored beer named for the town’s 8th-century founder.
This is an ideal recipe for trying out the cold-and-short method of dry hopping—in this iteration, with fruity Michigan-grown Chinook, but you can sub in whatever hops you want to test.
Here’s an example of split-batch brewing, with a batch that diverges post-boil to become both a hoppy lager and a saison. It's also a SMASH brew—single malt, single hop—leaning into German pilsner and lovely, lemony Loral.
To show what’s possible with “splatch” or split-batch brewing, Tannery Run head brewer Tim Brown shares this recipe for a brew that divides immediately after the boil to walk the divergent paths of a festbier lager and a tea-infused Belgian-style dubbel.
When the De Ranke brewery opened in 1994 as part of a new wave of Belgian microbreweries, its first beer was a beer inspired by Westmalle Tripel, Orval, and brewer Nino Bacelle’s love of hops.
Want to get messy with marshmallow? This hefty imperial stout recipe from White Elm Brewing in Lincoln, Nebraska, includes marshmallows in the kettle and coconut toasties in the fermentor.
With this fresh recipe from his Make Your Best series, Josh Weikert goes for relatively restrained roast in this dark lager—and you can tinker with it from there.
From Kristen England, grand master BJCP judge and head brewer at Bent Brewstillery in Roseville, Minnesota, comes this recipe inspired by Jamaica’s Dragon and other tropical stouts.
When following this recipe based on a kveik-fermented IPA from Chicago’s Burnt City Brewing, don’t leave out the most crucial step: the gjærkauk, i.e., screaming loudly while pitching the yeast, to scare the ghosts away.