Make Your Best


Make Your Best Double IPA

The style parameters here are actually pretty simple: very high ("…to absurdly high") bitterness, intense hops aroma and flavor (usually American or Australian or New World hops), with just enough malt character to provide some background and/or contrast.

Make Your Best Session IPA

Session IPA isn't just a question of reducing the gravity (although that's one way to go, and we will be): it's a question of generating a lot of flavor from hops and finding light ways to balance those flavors.

Make Your Best Blonde Ale

This Blonde Ale is more flavorful than your average "lawnmower" beer, so save it for after you mow. Once you dial in the recipe, this will be the beer that gets your non-beer-drinking friends started down the path to craft beer.

Blackstrap Foreign Extra Stout Recipe

Foreign Extra Stout isn’t a complicated style. However, it is a distinct style, and missing the mark on any one of several flavor characteristics will unavoidably drag it out of its home in category 16D and into one of the other stout styles.

Make Your Best White IPA

White IPA should not be confused with Belgian IPA. It's what you get when you combine the flavor profile of a Belgian Witbier with a lot of highly-complementary new age hops.

Make Your Best Grodziskie

This is a beer you should know how to brew, and the good news is that it's pleasantly simple to brew and sessionably wonderful to drink.

Make Your Best Gose

Once nearly extinct, both American and German breweries have saved this beer style, which can now be found on any number of tap lists and shelves. That's a wonderful thing, because it can be a fantastic beer.

A Primer on Descriptions when Entering Beer Competitions

Some brewing isn't really about entering competitions and winning awards but submitting your beer for the anonymous evaluation that competitions offer is usually a sound idea. But if you're going to enter, you might as well try to win. Here's some tips.

Make Your Best Doppelsticke Altbier

Doppelsticke, as its name implies, is a "doubled" version of the Sticke, making it something akin to a German Barleywine.

Make Your Best: Classic Style Smoked Beer

Smoked malts can be touchy to work with. For one thing, not every batch of smoked malt is identical, even when comprised of the same grain and smoked with the same wood. Dive into this specialty grain with our homebrewing columnist to learn more.