The culmination of brewing experience gives the knowledge of the influence of each ingredient on the finished product. But at the same time, there are hints of apprehension around the unknown. I mean, it’s hard to tell what exactly will happen as a result of the addition of an ounce of Cascades at 15 minutes.

Here are a few rules for making your own recipes followed by an idea.

1. Keep it simple: Making a recipe doesn’t have to be tough. In the end, a bunch of extract and a few ounces of hops will make a perfectly agreeable beer. Pick some stats: color, gravity, IBU. Then put together some ingredients to meet those stats. And there you go. Your very own beer.
2. Leverage the past: Look at the recipes you’ve already brewed. Think about how the beers came out. Consider taking one of your old favorites, and modify one thing. Voila! Your own recipe! With minimum risk. Then build from there.
3. Just do it: In the end, you can read all you want, but you just have to try something. The more you make the more you get to know how it all works. Consider it an iterative process. You get an idea of what you want to make. You come up with a recipe. It is off by a little bit in some certain way. You adjust the recipe to address that deficiency. It is off in a different way. You adjust. It is not perfect. You adjust. And so on.

Now: here is the idea. Imagine if you could pick your beer style and there was a computer program to make the recipe for you. What do you think? Have you ever seen anything like that? Could it even work?

I ended up with a Dundee mixer 12-pack for $10.99. One dollar cheaper than the Red Hoook $11.99 special (I already used the $5 rebate, so that doesn’t count any more). Worth a shot for the Dundee.

Plus it’s a mix pack, two each of six different beer styles. IPA, Pale Ale, Porter, Wheat, Pale Bock, and the immortal Honey Brown. At least it’s a variety, and if one is terrible, little is lost. Besides, who could predict which would be the best? Mix packs like this satisfy the ticker in me.

So far I have had the Pale Bock, Pale Ale, and Porter. The Pale Bock was typical. Lame, rough around the edges, made with an Ale yeast. Just so-so, but not terrible. The Pale Ale was actually pretty good. Nice hop character and bitterness, as advertised (bottle says “Pleasantly Hoppy” or something along those lines). Not a ton of bitterness, not a ton of hopness, but overall nicely balanced, if a little blah. Definitely good enough.

But the porter. At first, I was like, “meh” when I smelled it after pouring. The color was nice and dark, but it had that same annoyingly regular English-style yeast smell. It even has that almost spoiled aroma that you can sometimes find in the less-purchased brands at the beer store. But the flavor really excels beyond the expectations set by the disappointing aroma. It isn’t exactly Gonzo Imperial Porter, but it has a solid black beer taste, with a nice roasty bitter darkness. There’s enough bitterness to balance it out and maybe even some hop flavor, or at least a requisite residual sweetness.

Really a nice porter. It has me looking forward to some of the others. I’m not expecting Ruination from the IPA, and I wonder if Honey Brown will be as enjoyable as I remember from college, but I think the Wheat could end up pleasing me. If I am inspired to do so, I will let you know how it goes.

Furthermore, kegging is so quick and easy, it takes around a half an hour at most, and you’re done. It’s all so wonderful. I am euphoric every time I complete a kegging run. It is just so satisfying and a great symbol of many weeks of drinking pleasure to come in the future.

But kegging has a dark side that I’m experiencing this week.

You can never really tell how much beer is left in that keg, and there comes a time in the life of any keg when it pours its last pour. Often I am anticipating this moment for a few weeks before it occurs, but it still never fails to disappoint when it happens. There you are, pumping beer into your glass when suddenly it blows. Pop fizz puff puff and there’s a glass half full of beer, half full of foam, all full of debris. You don’t even get to enjoy that last glass because of all the unpleasant solids from the bottom of the keg.

It’s times like this that I wonder if I should be filtering or otherwise controlling more strictly the debris racked into the keg.

At any rate, I’ve somewhat anticipated this, as I am kegging up my latest IPA (10 SRM, 1.075 OG, and 75 IBU) tomorrow. But that will still leave me with two empty keg slots and one keg that can’t be more than half full. Unless I want to be drinking Long Trails and Red Hooks through February, I better get to making some more beer!

Up next is a sort of Anchor OSA inspired beer: a porter fermented with wheat beer yeast. I won’t add trees and stuff like they do, but I think that a schwarzweizen is going to be close enough. And I think I’ll call it “Pants on the Ground” because I just can’t resist.

Lookin’ like a FOOL with your beer on the ground!

I have had these bacterial cultures in my fridge for a while, and I decided to finally put them to work. I made a lambic. Half malted wheat and half pale malt, with a handful of what we dubbed “bunny hops” boiled for 60 minutes. I skipped the whole raw wheat turbid mash four hour boil thing, and went pretty standard with an infusion mash around 148°F for this one.

I happened to have a bag full of really really old hops from the great and knowledgeable Zok. As we were looking through the hops and came across this paper bag with “hops” in it, naturally the instinct was to take a whiff. There was some smell there, but it wasn’t hops. It was just generic vegetative matter. We decided that they smelled like bunny food, and as we broke them apart in our hands we honestly wondered if they were hops at all.

But I decided to use them anyway, and once I dropped them into the boiling kettle of wort it was clear that they were hops. It is amazing how something that smells so unappealing raw can blossom into the wonderfully spicy smell of delicate European hops boiled in sugary wort.

Naturally, this wild beer will sit for a long time in the primary fermenter, and it was clear from the outset that a bucket just wouldn’t do. As it happens, I have a few glass carboys that I just never use because they are a lot harder to clean than a bucket, and I never primary ferment for more than two weeks anyway, so the oxygen permeability thing isn’t so much of a concern. Especially since most beers don’t last more than a few months around here. But a lambic just begs for glass.

So it was time to learn some new techniques for getting wort from kettle to fermenter. I mean, you can’t exactly use a kitchen strainer to fill a carboy, and my funnel is not well-suited for use with the strainer or the carboy (except maybe for yeast). I hardly planned at all, and was left trying to figure out this problem as the wort quickly cooled from the wintry cold chiller water.

In the end, I decided the autosiphon was the way to go. It would just go right from kettle to carboy, and since I use diffused O2, I wouldn’t have to worry about the pouring back-and-forth aeration regimen.

It worked awesome for the lambic. I got a mostly clear runoff, or as much as you could expect from a half wheat mash with no Whirfloc, and small layer of trub at the end on the bottom of the carboy. This was probably at least as well as I could have done with the strainer-into-the-bucket act I am accustomed to.

So I tried the same thing with the second brew of the day: an IPA. I figured why not try the IPA in glass, and see if it makes a difference. Maybe I’m exaggerating the difficulty of cleaning a carboy. After all, PBW is magical given a few hours to soak. Time will tell if I am about to make the switch to glass, but so far I do like watching the fermentation activity.

It’s funny to make two beers in the same day that can often end up being so different. For the lambic, I wanted the oldest, lowest alpha hops with the least aroma I could find. And for the IPA, each hop pellet was lovingly smelled, appraised, and praised for its freshness as it was measured out. The lambic enjoys a simple grain bill while the IPA likes to experiment with different ways to get those 10 SRM.

The IPA did not have such a successful trub removal. For about half the siphon, the wort was super clear. I was excited! But then all the material started coming through the siphon. I don’t know if it was just cold break or the six ounces of hop pellets mostly added in the last 20 minutes. But there ended up being a few inches of lighter-colored debris in the bottom of the carboy.

It looks less bad now that fermentation has been agitating the beer for so many days, but I’ve come up with a better plan to remove that stuff next time I use glass. I can strain through the kitchen strainer into a bucket and then siphon from the bucket into the carboy. That essentially gives me two levels of trub removal – one through the strainer (which used to be the only level), and a second through the siphon.

I just hope I remember to use this method next time.

One day, I got an email from a brewery seeking a media outlet for their beer. And I was it. I love that kind of thing. I don’t get it every day. Or really every month. Or even quarterly. So I had in the mail a pair of bottles of beer and some marketing info. I’d given the expectation to the brewery that I’d review the beer online. But yet I never found that “right time” to “formally review” the beer. I drank one of them right away, and formed my initial impressions, and then the second has sat in my fridge since then. It’s been probably about six months since I first tried this summer special from the certified organic Bison brewery from California.

Now, finally, I have got the guts up to write up this one.

I remember thinking that this beer was pretty good and summery, nice and refreshing, but basil? Couldn’t find it. I still pretty much feel the same way with this “cellared” sample. It is a very good and tasty beer, but I would never pick out basil in a blind tasting.

And I think that it is this subtlety that makes this one really unique. I wonder if I could manage to wrangle up a basil-heavy pizza, would it come more forward? I think it would. If I really search for it, I taste an herbal thing that easily translates to basil.

All in all, this is a nice clean crisp dry beer. Full of flavor, and fully engaged into the new craft of balanced beer. Honestly, this beer makes me wonder for the flavors of the other offerings from Bison brewery, especially in this personal favorite seasonal drinking time of winter. One day when I find myself in Bison country, I will make sure to add this brewery to my list of must-haves.

One more note: I recently bought a 12-pack of Sierra Nevada Anniversary. Packaged in summer, Anniversary should hold up well. And here’s this Bison Basil beer, not exactly a cellaring candidate. But yet the SN has shown signs of spoilage, while the Bison is in perfect condition. It is interesting to see how the big craft brewers end up, in some cases, with issues that the truly small brewers don’t always face.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love Sierra Nevada, right up there with Dogfish Head and the other bigger smaller brewers. But at the same time I see how these truly small brewers like Bison can make their beer at just that much of a higher quality than those bigger guys.

For some reason, a lot of people are mad about this. Well, actually I understand the reaction. Until about a few months ago, I couldn’t get Stone here in Connecticut. I had to drive to the beer Mecca known as the state of Rhode Island to get Stone.

But now I can get Stone right here in CT. And I am quite happy that I can. I mean, a $7 bomber of 13th Anniversary is a good thing for poker night.

So now that I have access, I am all for more access to more people. At the same time, I can understand the views of people in states that still can’t get Stone. I mean, why not make more beer in the US, maybe from a Midwest or East Coast location. Imagine if some Americans could get Stone from the Shelton Bros before they could get it from the local Sam Adams distributor!

All that said, I think that making American beer in Europe is an awesome idea! I know that I prefer beer made in America for freshness reasons, and if Delerium (for example) started making beer in USA, I’d be all over it. So now fans of American beer will be able to get the real thing made relatively locally!

Stone opening a European branch extends the reach of not only “craft beer” but also of “American-style” “craft beer”. And that’s a good thing.

There has been a lot going around about how two “breweries” own over 200 beer brands, comprising a vast majority of the American beer market. As a result, there are a lot of “Bud sucks” kind of remarks out there, as well as abundant boycott sentiment against the big two, three, or four from the craft beer defenders of the world wide web.

Now I love craft beer as much as anyone. I make it a priority to buy American craft beer, with special weighting given to beer produced close to where I am buying it. At the same time, I don’t mind indulging in a Bass or a Guinness every now and then. Maybe a Trappist or an appellation-approved Lambic. Even Indian Euro-lager-style beer can make its way into my blood stream when I’m eating Indian food.

To many of these people, where, or by whom the beer is made is more important than the beer itself. I got into a mild online fight about Bud Light Golden Wheat. That beer is not that bad. If the price was right I would even buy that beer. It is good. Not Sierra Nevada Torpedo good, but off the goodness charts compared to almost anything else with the Bud name on it (Budweiser American Ale is pretty good, too).

As much as I love to hate A-B InBev, if they make a beer that I can tolerate – or even like – then that’s a plus in my book. They are not to be hated just for existing, but rather for diluting the American palate to believe that liquids like Bud Light are actually beer-ish. So, as big beer attempts to break into the craft beer market, I welcome their entrance. There are a lot of folks that give a lot of credibility to the big names of beer, and they would try something just because it has their favorite beer’s name on it.

Imagine the day when A-B makes a Triple IPA or a straight spontaneously fermented three year old Gueuze. Michelob already produces an oaked beer. In my mind any move to increase the profile of things that you and I would consider beer is a good thing.

This past week I read somewhere about how people will force-fit beers into styles that they feel match their drinking personalities. One that really hit home was “I don’t drink BarleyWine, I drink IPA. That’s an IIPA.” Sitting here looking at a quarter-pint of my “IIPA” I realized I might be one of those people that so fancies myself an IPA drinker, that I’d even delude myself into thinking that the beer that I made was an IIPA when in fact it is a BarleyWine.

So I pulled out the BeerSmith to check out the style guidelines and how my beer fit into them.

Other than the 8 SRM color, this one fits squarely in the middle of the Barley Wine Style. Aiming for 70 IBU should have been my clue that I was not really making an IIPA, especially with an OG around 1.090. Even two ounces of hops at flameout and two more dry hopped for a week can’t really convert a recipe like that into an IIPA without a few dozen more IBU.

It is now that I realize that I believe myself to be an IPA drinker because I like beers made around 50-70 IBU. In the realm of commercial beer, especially the standard-strength variety, that means it’s IPA time. Of course in homebrewing, nothing prevents one from making a 10% ABV beer pale colored with a meager 70 IBU and a ton of late hops.

In the end, that’s what I love about making my own beer. Forget about the market, and what others want. I get to make just the beer I want. Even if it doesn’t come out quite how I’d imagined it, it comes out more like what I want than the random sixer from the packy.