The Beer Craft, Homebrewing Podcast

In this episode of  The Beer Craft , Ben and Andrew dive into Northwest Brewers Supply's new Summer Brewing Series —four recipes designed to keep you brewing through the hottest months of the year. We tackle the biggest reasons brewers put the kettle away when summer arrives: warm fermentation spaces, busy schedules, and the misconception that you need a fermentation fridge to make great beer. The...

Some debates may never be settled: Ford vs. Chevy, Miller vs. Bud, the Yankees aren't that good... As unlikely as we are to redraw the battle lines, we are going to give you the good, the bad, and the not quite so bad as you may have thought, unless we are talking about the Yankees.  The questions about the topic are as varied as there are brewers. Ask 10 brewers what they prefer, and you're just...

Before refrigeration. Before vitamin supplements. Before anyone knew what vitamin C even was. People brewed with trees. This week, Ben and Andrew trace the surprising history of spruce beer, a drink that helped sailors survive long ocean voyages, supplied British troops in colonial North America, and became one of the earliest regional brewing traditions on the continent. From the decks of explora...

If you take corn, rye, and barley, add some yeast, and what do you get? You could be brewing a Kentucky common beer, and no one will bat an eye, but the moment you run that through a still... Recently, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a ruling that the prohibition on homedistilling was unconstitutional. Does that mean we can fire up ol' Smokey on the front lawn?  This week on the Beer Craft...

The ancient alchemists never figured out how to turn lead into gold, but they did help crack open the door to modern chemistry, laboratory science, and the very human habit of asking, "What happens if I put this with that?" Which, honestly, sounds a lot like brewing. In this episode of The Beer Craft, Ben and Andrew look at beer through the lens of old alchemy: taking base materials, applying heat...

Way back at the beginning of this podcast I sat down with Greg Pore co-owner and brewer at Terramar brewing and we had a fantastic talk about Berlinerweisse.  Unfortunately we weren't ready to have him in the studio at the time, but I promised him one day we would do so. Well, after over a year I'm finally making good on my promise. We had Greg into the studio and three beer geeks put their heads...

We're taking a swing at the beer myths that won't die: lagers are "too hard," extract beer is "inferior," you "need" a secondary, more hops always make a better IPA, and airlock bubbling somehow tells you everything you need to know. Some of this advice is outdated. Some of it was never right to begin with. And some of it came from a guy who brewed once in 2003 and never updated his notes. In this...

Before Corona. Before Tecate. Before Mexican lager. Mexico had pulque, pronounced POOL-keh , a thick, funky, fermented agave drink that was once one of the most popular alcoholic drinks in the country, and sacred to the Aztecs. So what happened? In this episode of The Beer Craft , Ben and Andrew dig into one of the earliest "fake news" campaigns in alcohol history, a smear job that helped take dow...

We aren't getting political, but the price of a 4 pack of beer in the grocery store is getting a little ridiculous. $16 four packs!  This week on The Beer Craft, we break down the numbers and look at the economy of homebrewing. You can actually save money on beer by making it yourself. Plus, you get to buy gear! What a juicy dopamine hit that is... So shine up your kettle and crack open a fresh on...

I know I had posted this as a Make Beer Cheap Again, but I mixed up my audio files.  This week on the Podcast we take a look at the Northwest Beer Scene and answer some burning questions from the field.  Music Attribution   "Twisted" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/  "RetroFuture Dirty" Kevin Mac...

We did a whole show about reading a COA, but sometimes we need something that we can chew on. This week on The Beer Craft we are looking at what we can do to test and evaluate our grain choices without all the math. So put down your slide rules, grab a beer or four, for... The Beer Craft, Homebrewing Podcast.    Music Attribution  "Twisted" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative C...

Because I am more than a barley obsessed wrangler of single cell intoxicant creating critters, we are talking about wine kits! I know that both employ the tallents of saccharomyces cerevisiae, and that one molecule of glucose or sucrose amounts to the same thing as far as those unicellurlar marvels are concerned, and that just because we changed our sugar source we need a whole new set of adverbs...

If there ever was a beer that started the craft beer movement, a beer with one foot firmly rooted in history, and led by an unlikely pioneer, it would have to be San Francisco's Anchor Steam Beer. A beer style that was practicly extinct, a mere footnote in the lineup of a failing brewery, and one which was given another moment in the sunshine thanks to mondern household appliances.  Though the bee...

We sit down with a reguluar listener, Adam Woodworth and taste a line up of Pale Ales while discussing the in's and outs of Brew in a Bag (BIAB). We'll go over the process and dispel a few rumors this week on The Beer Craft.    Music Attribution  "Twisted" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/   Retro...

Going Way Beyond Rosemary time and basil this week on the Beer Craft Home Brewing Podcast, we take a look at the Botany of beer. We take a look at what Mother Nature has in store for the brewhouse, how to use them, and what we can do with them. There are more than a few herbs and spices that we should watch out for, as they can lead to health problems or medication reactions. Since the show's spon...

Belgian beer looks chaotic from the outside, but there's a clear blueprint once you know where to look. This episode breaks down the core ideas behind the country's brewing culture and explains why Belgian brewers create beers that don't fit into tidy boxes. Ben and Andrew cover the four families of Belgian beer, the role of yeast, the country's approach to balance, and why sugar, glassware, and r...

Recently I surveyed the local brewing community to find out directly what were the most significant sources of frustration, or problems they had in brewing. I wanted to put my finger on the pulse of the modern homebrewer. By far, the most common problem respondents had was making time to brew.  Since the pandemic, we have gone from having all the time in the world, to be so busy we're dizzy. I thi...

We're closing out our five-part beer design run with a bang. The last gap on the Northwest Brewers Supply beer list is a Cold IPA, so that's tonight's target. Is a Cold IPA just an IPL in new clothes? The BJCP hasn't said a word about it, so we dig into the difference. We look at what went wrong with classic IPLs and can the Italian pilsner gives us a spark as we search for a crisp, clean, hoppy b...

Part 4 of the series, On Air Beer Design. Tonight, we tackle an Amber Ale. This hybrid of a Pale Ale was the signature beer for the West Coast for anyone who didn't want an IPA. I think we might have a tasty litttle number when we get throught the brew day.  So Sit back and enjoy the show.    Cheers

This week on the podcast, we put our heads together on an oatmeal stout. We had plenty of inspiration, including a maple coconut stout that we are still drooling over.  Why wouldn't you want to listen to that?   Music attribution  "Twisted" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ RetroFuture Dirty   "Re...

We are back in the studio with another round of beer design. We wanted to create two more beers this week but we talk too much. We did manage to come up with another recipe, this time a mexi lager. We will come upo with a oatmeal stout next week.    So sit back with a six pack and let's get ready for Beer30.    "Twisted" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attributi...

  This week on The Beer Crafters , Ben and Andrew put their recipe-building hats on for a design session straight from the back room at Northwest Brewers Supply. First up: a crisp, clean classic Pilsner. Then, a malty heavyweight we're probably calling the "Agrivator" — a Doppelbock with enough attitude to stir up a few fields. You may have noticed the show has a new name. Turns out, not everyone'...

This episode marks the anniversary of the show and the start of Season 2. Hard to believe we are still at it. Most podcasts end after 11 episodes. There is so much of you, the listeners, to blame for that. Thanks for joining us along the way.  This week on the Beer Craft, we take a look under the hood of our favorite beer related vegetable, hops. Just what kind of alchemy goes on within the little...

The flavor of apple is not known as a star in the world of beer thanks to Acetaldehyde, but what about Pear? Can we shape a pale ale around the other fall fruit? This Week on the Show, we sit down with Mark Lutz, a  long-time homebrewer and friend of the show, to talk about his annual harvest Pale Ale. For years, Mark has filled Andrew's head with stories of his family's fall classic, and now we f...

Beer History has been one of the ways that keep me ingaged in this hobby. A while back I thought about the beers that started the craft beer movement, from Fritz Maytag's Anchor Steam to Ken Grossman's Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. Here in Washington, there was a standout with the slogan "Think Globally, Drink Locally" that certainly had a hand in shaping the trajectory of Beer. I set out to recreate th...