Landfills. On the drive from Kansas City to Indianapolis, Andrea and I always pass a landfill just East of East Saint Louis. Invariably, white birds fly contrastively over heaps of human waste. Green hills jut out of the otherwise flat landscape and appear fertile, despite the underlying material. It’s always a notably strange site. I [...]
Few things on earth give me more joy than brewing and drinking the beer that I make. Flying solo or drinking it with my wife is a more than sufficient means of enjoyment as far as I’m concerned. Yet, there is nothing like sharing brew with family, friends, and acquaintances. I love the thrill of [...]
Believe it or not, running this blog is an actual expense for Mike and I. Contextually speaking, however, “expense” is pretty much an arbitrary term. Monetarily, it costs us time and money to maintain this site, BUT the relationships we’ve built make it a virtual gold mine. That being said, it’s pretty cool when you [...]
Beginning with a recipe for spent grain bread, this article is the first in a series to explore “Thrifty Homebrewing,” where we share ideas for conserving, preserving, and saving resources in homebrewing.
On several occasions I’ve mentioned that when it comes to brewing beer, the more ownership I have over the process, the better I feel about the finished product. For example, I make my own candy sugar, dry my own orange peels, and culture much of the yeast I use. Recently I planted my own hop [...]
One of the many important steps to proper brewing is crushing one grains, ESPECIALLY for the brewer who bypasses extracted malts and brews all-grain. You see, the all-grain brewer must extract sugars from the starches hidden inside malted barley. To access this treasure trove of future beer, the husk of the barley must be cracked [...]
As I am certain many fellow beer drinkers, bloggers, and brewers can attest, life can be brutal sometimes. Sometimes it can be brutal in the sense of cruel, but I am speaking more along the lines of breakneck, no rest, drooping eyes type brutal. Perhaps busyness, clutter—whatever you choose to call it—most aptly describes how [...]
Sometimes the phrase “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure” can truly hit home. Andrea and I have some friends near San Diego and went to visit them this past weekend, which led to me obtaining some seriously nice oak barrels. How did it happen? Well, our friend has started growing grapes on his property [...]
Home brewing. What can I say, I love it. I love making it, I love thinking through my recipes and learning new tidbits about it. My current tradition has been to not really care about peeling labels or making my own. This shouldn’t be mistaken as merely a utilitarian use of beer. I just have [...]
Oftentimes I would love to brew during the week but find that it is not really that plausible after work…or…it wasn’t. I’ve recently rediscovered the joy of brewing lower gravity (most recently a mild) brews. In the past, my brews have tended to be pretty big, wheat heavy, or fairly involved. Large grain bills that [...]
