Ready to build a fire and brew a traditional stone beer at home? Grab your tongs and get ready to rock.
Mashing with hot rocks isn’t just an antiquated quirk of a few farmhouse brewers. In fact, we may be able to blame the technique for the founding of human civilization.
The idea of making beer with flaming-hot rocks conjures an indelible mental image, yet the common understanding of what “steinbier” was is almost totally wrong. Here, Lars Marius Garshol explains the methods of a lost farmhouse style.
Extract brewing provides a more-than-capable canvas for getting creative with the unusual fruits that arrive this time of year. Annie Johnson breaks it down.
Here is Annie Johnson’s recipe for a rich, complex, adjunct-free imperial stout that mellows and improves with some time in the cellar.
Maybe that P in IPA can stand for “pitch-black.” Once again helping us to extract the most characterful beer from extract brewing, Annie Johnson has the details on Cascadian dark ale, aka American black ale or black IPA.
Die-hards will say you need to go all-grain to brew a great pilsner. They’ll also say you need strict temperature control. That’s fine—we don’t have to share our beer or our tricks with them.
Josh Pfriem, brewmaster and cofounder of pFriem Family Brewers in Hood River, Oregon, breaks down their approach to Kölsch-Style Ale—an exercise in precision and a gold-medal winner at last year’s Great American Beer Festival.
With saison’s high attenuation, delicate body, fermentation-driven complexities, and lasting foam, it would be easy to assume that extract brewers are at a disadvantage. Not necessarily, as Annie Johnson explains.
Whether English or American or breaking new ground, barleywines are the Cadillacs of the ale world. Can you brew a great one with extracts? Of course you can. Annie Johnson breaks it down in our ongoing series on extract-brewing exceptional beers.