A Homebrewer's Journal

Obligatory welcome and second-person plural salutations to all!

In these pages, over the coming months and (hopefully) years, you will find a running commentary on the progress of beer brewed by my friends and me in our homes. The plan, as of now, is to follow each batch from the boil to the bottle (or keg). This will include recipes, accounts of the steps and missteps of the process, and photos of the concoction from wort to young beer to tall glass of bubbly malty fermented goodness.

Most of our recipes will come from the 3rd edition of Charlie Papazian's The Complete Joy of Homebrewing. For reasons of copyright, the actual recipes will not appear here. Recipe names and page references will, however, as will any deviations from the basic recipe. For example, we might make "Rocky Raccoon's Crystal Honey Lager" (p.210) with a Belgian Trappist ale yeast rather than a lager yeast. Some recipes will be originals (or at least independently derived — it's nigh-impossible to guarantee originality). Original recipes will generally be listed in full.

For the record, in our current efforts (3 in total), which began last Autumn and is the first brewing that I've personally done since leaving Illinois in 1997, we have brewed or are in the process of brewing six batches. These include:

• A weizen from a kit, I believe it was "Brewer's Best Weizenbier" (consumed)
• "Goat Scrotum Ale", (p.200) (consumed)
• "Winky Dink Märzen" (p.184) (bottled, aged, mostly consumed)
• "Rocky Raccoon's Crystal Honey Lager" (p.210) (kegged, aged, partially consumed)
• A strong IPA (strong ale/IPA hybrid) of our own devising (aging in a Party Pig and growlers)
• "Danger Knows No Favorites Dunkel" (p.204) (fermenting, kegging imminent)