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I’ve heard that 5 Seasons Westside is tapping their first keg of “rainwater beer” tomorrow evening.  Rainwater beer is exactly what it sounds like.  Beer made from rainwater collected at the brewery.  The brewery partnered with RainHarvest Systems to set up a system with 6 filters and a UV sterilizers that filters the water down [...]

Last year, I harvested my hops in September. That was a little bit late.  They probably should have been harvested mid-August.
This year, I harvested my hops about an hour ago.  It was almost the perfect time to be harvesting them–a whole two months earlier than last year.  Here’s hoping for a second harvest.

The homebrew group of which I am a member got some local press recently in Creative Loafing.  The article covers one of our club meetings and the homebrew exploits of some of our members.

At our last Final Gravity group brew was recorded by one of the members.  I thought I’d share the video of the group brew with everyone.  I didn’t have any hand in making the video, but I am in the video.

There’s an article in Technology Review called “Brewing with Synthetic Biology.”  In this case the “brewing” refers to fermenting beer, as the articles mentions making modifications to yeast to control the time of flocculation.  Flocculation is basically the process of yeast clumping together and settling out of beer.  I tweeted about this article a little [...]

Now that my hops have all been harvested, I will list all of the varieties that I planted in order of productivity.  This may or may not be a good indication of how well these hops grow in a Dectur, Georgia climate.
1) Centennial
2) Cascade
3) Hallertauer
4) Willamette
5) Chinook (almost nothing)
6) Fuggle (nothing)

I had to post a link to this blog, just because I think it’s cool.  It’s a blog dedicated to knitting and homebrewing and the similarities between the two crafts.  From the “About the Author” section of the blog:
“A Knitter’s Guide to Beer” is a book project that will find similarities between the craft of [...]

Of course, just minutes after that last post, I went out to look at the hops and realized that some of the cones were turning brown and needed harvesting.  I harvested them by lowering the fence sections to the ground and clipping the cones off at that point.  It worked pretty well in that I [...]

As promised, here are some pictures of how the hop vines are doing.  They’re actually doing quite well as you can see.  The vines look very healthy and I first started noticing cones about a month ago.
The big question now is when to harvest.  From what I hear, the cones begin to feel dry and [...]

I was checking out the blog for Beer Activist yesterday and there’s a link to a story on Philly.com about the use (or lack thereof) of refillable bottles.  The argument is made that we should go back to a system in which beer (and beverages in general) is sold in refillable bottles that can be [...]