The ultimate hand-crafted beer is your next homebrew
By Adem Tepedelen
Published January 2013, Volume 33, Number 6
In a funny sort of way, homebrewing has come full circle. Thirty-four years ago, our country’s 39th President, Jimmy Carter, signed H.R. 1337 which effectively legalized homebrewing nationwide. And now, shortly after another presidential election, our 44th President, Barack Obama, has released to the public his recipe for the first beer ever brewed on the White House grounds. The fact that this presidential beer—a honey ale—was made with honey gathered from the White House’s own hives is emblematic of what homebrewing has become today, a craft, like cooking (or beekeeping), that empowers people to do for themselves and rely less on packaged, processed, mass-produced food and beverages.
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By Randy Mosher
Published January 2008, Volume 28, Number 6
At first, most of us were happy enough to brew a beer that didn’t poison anyone.
However, as with all hobbyists, homebrewers get restless and start looking for ways to improve our game. Eventually, we may become relaxed enough about brewing to start cooking up our own recipes, or bold enough to enter a competition. Then there’s the step to all grain, for those who have the time and the inclination. Maybe jump up to bigger batches, as one guy in our club said, “…to keep the band together.”
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By Randy Mosher
Published May 2004, Volume 25, Number 2
“Chick beers,” the beer geeks call them. You know the brews. Pink, fluffy little numbers, a bland wheat beer base dolled up with a drop or two of raspberry essence. Not a bad quencher on a blistering summer day, but not what you’d call profound, or even interesting. We’re talking about something altogether more substantial here.
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By Randy Mosher
Published November 2002, Volume 23, Number 5
Inevitably, it seems, what is good and what is fun can be most accurately represented by those little cartoon angels and devils that perch on our shoulders and whisper conflicting suggestions into our befuddled ears. Who would have guessed that the simple—or complicated, as deep-enders like myself practice it—act of homebrewing could join together good and fun in one sparkling amber liquid.
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British Summer Ale
By Randy Mosher
Published May 2002, Volume 23, Number 2
A shaft of golden light rips through a thin patch of the blotchy white sky. On the beach below, towels unfurl to reveal bumpy legs cased in vampire-white flesh, which cooks quickly to prawn pink in the hazy brilliance. Released from the dark closet of winter, seekers young and old sit and squint, dazed, mole-like, in the mossy sea air. It’s a perfect summer day in England.
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Fermenting Revolution Over Three Decades
By Stan Hieronymus
Published September 2001, Volume 22, Number 4
The American homebrewing community rallied with its usual passion last year when a devastating fire that leveled 400 homes in Los Alamos, NM, forced all 18,000 residents to be evacuated and the Los Alamos National Laboratory to be closed for two weeks. As news spread that three members of the local homebrew club, the Atom Mashers, lost their homes and another, a storage shed, donations poured in. Read More…
