When brewing experiments go bad
What to do with a staghorn sumac wheat beer and a root beer stout that fail to live up to expectations.
experimental beers with a botanical twist
Brewing
Ten Tips for Homebrewing in a Pandemic
Before you start hoarding homebrew ingredients willy-nilly, read this.
New page: Why brew with herbs?
At long last, a bit of back story on my journey with herbal brewing, so first-time visitors of the site will be able to quickly figure out just how little I really know.
New page of herbal brewing tips
I’ve been putting off writing a page of tips on how to brew with herbs and spices. Then today, quite by accident, I rediscovered just such a list I’d pulled together for my original homepage some 15 years ago, and had long since forgotten about.
Brewing in Coal Country
Lots of craft breweries pay tribute to the unique characteristics of their local area, but few do it as well or as thoroughly as Coal Country Brewing.
Brewing, writing, thinking
I realized the other day that I approach writing poetry the same way I approach brewing beer.
The terroir of London homebrewing
A summer in London gave unparalleled opportunities to exploit terroir through local or regional malts, hops, herbs, fruit, and water.
Sweetfern Chamomile Gruit Ale
My first new experiment worth writing up since last year’s Pennsylvania Native Plant Gruit Beer, where I first tried brewing with sweetfern (Comptonia peregrina) in a big way. This time I combined it with some other reliable brewing herbs for a trans-Atlantic gruit.
Pennsylvania Native Plant Gruit Beer
A malt-forward, porter-like beer with a nicely balanced blend of root-beerish flavors
Brewing with red raspberries: two approaches
Red raspberry imperial mugwort stout and raspberry-black currant wheat beer.
Alcoholic root beer, Prohibition-style
A light, refreshing, warming beverage with a very well-balanced flavor profile. Does it taste like root beer? Not really; there’s nothing caramelly about it. More like a spiced pilsner.
Meadowsweet, Heather and Gentian Gruit
This was my other stand-out beer of the winter 2014-15 brewing season. The idea was to make a vaguely Neolithic-style ale inspired by archaeological findings in Britain.
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