Few experiences in brewing are more rewarding—or make for better practice—than bringing some undersung, underloved, old-fashioned beer styles to life in your own brewhouse. Josh Weikert makes the case for learning, drinking, and brewing the canon.
Here is Annie Johnson‘s partial-mash recipe for an English-style barleywine, getting classic depth from judicious caramel malts and east Kent Goldings hops.
From his Make Your Best series on dialing in various beer styles, here is Josh Weikert’s recipe for a Czech-style dark lager—a session-strength lager with layers of malt flavor and spicy hop character.
“Kelvin is one of our favorite beers,” says Shawn Bainbridge, cofounder of Halfway Crooks. He describes the beer as “a happy place” for the “finest German hops and smoked malt.”
For our magazine subscribers, here is a homebrew-scale recipe for the award-winning pilsner from East Brother Beer in Richmond, California.
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.