The older I get the more things I learned at school become superceded. For instance, when I was a kid, Pluto was a planet but now, when my five-year-old daughter recites the […]
U is for Umami
T is for Trappist breweries
The thing I find most fascinating about Trappist breweries that there is a “Trappist police” of sorts who closely monitor who is calling themselves that. If you look at a bottle from […]
S is for Snakebite
Being a guy who always has a book on the go, from time to time I’ve been reading a British novel and come a drink called Snakebite, and another one called a […]
Homebrew hopes
What you see above is the secret ingredient in my latest batch of homebrew. Okay, sure, it’s hardly “secret” given that I’ve included a picture of it. Which I guess just makes […]
R is for Reinheitsgebot
Okay, I’ll confess my ignorance here. I figured the Reinheitsgebot (which I’ll call Reiny because it’s easier to type) was an olde worlde recommendation for beer with no legislative muscle at all. […]
Q is for quarter
Devoting one blog post a day to a different letter in the Oxford Companion to Beer has its drawbacks. The biggest one is when you hit one of those high-scoring letters in […]
P is for pine, fir and spruce tips
When I drink some US IPAs I joke that they’ve brewed it by throwing a Christmas tree into the fermenting tanks. You know, because they taste super-piney. But pine trees have actually […]
O is for Orval
Of all the beers from Trappist breweries, Orval is definitely my favourite. Firstly, how can you go past that lovely art deco-style bottle? Then there’s the beer itself, pale and with far […]
N is for near beer
While the idea of an almost totally alcohol-free beer-like substance is largely mocked, it saved a number of breweries during the dark days of Prohibition. Called “non-alcoholic beer” in Australia, near beer […]
M is for mash hopping
Now this is a technique I’m going to try in a homebrew at some stage in the future. Greatly simplified, the brewing process involves soaking grain in water to get the sugars […]
BEER IS YOUR FRIEND 