Author: Professor Good Ales

The past few years have revealed some disturbing news for the alcohol industry. In 2015, CBS news broke the announcement of a lawsuit against 31 brands of wines for high levels of inorganic arsenic. In 2016, beer testing in Germany also revealed residues of glyphosate in every single sampletested, even independent beers. Moms Across America released test results of 12 California wines that were all found to be positive for glyphosate in 2016. We tested further and released new findings last week of glyphosate in all of the most popular brands of wines in the world, the majority of which are from the U.S., and in batch test results in American beer.

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Beer wouldn’t be possible without the fabulous fungus that is yeast, which converts sugars into alcohol through fermentation. Scientists from the University of California-Berkeley have figured out how to make the microbe do double duty and add hoppy flavors to a lab-made pale ale that didn’t include any actual hops in the recipe.

Two (presumably beer-loving) scientists first isolated the various oils naturally produced by hops, the flowers of the Humulus lupulus plant, which gives hoppy beer its bitter flavor. Then, they sought out other plants that naturally produce these same oils, and isolated the genes responsible. Once those genes were isolated, the scientists used them to genetically modify the DNA of brewer’s yeast so that the fungi would produce the same bitter oils. After a number of trial brews, they found that genes from a mint and basil worked best when spliced into a strain of brewer’s yeast.

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The Brewers Association, publishers of CraftBeer.com and the trade organization to protect and promote small brewers, has released its 2018 Brewers Association Beer Style Guidelines. The release includes a trio of beer styles identified in the guidelines and Brewers Association competitions as “Juicy or Hazy Pale Ale,” “Juicy or Hazy IPA” and “Juicy or Hazy Double IPA.” These styles represent what some beer geeks and brewers popularly refer to as New England IPAs or Hazy IPAs.

The addition of “Juicy or Hazy” ales are among several other updates to the 2018 Brewers Association’s Beer Style Guidelines. The annual Great American Beer Festival (GABF) 2018 competition in September will be the first national competition which will include the new style guidelines.

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This homebrew experiment was originally published as “Brew in a Bag: The Impact Squeezing the Bag has on Beer Character” on Brulosophy.com.

I recently switched from the batch sparge brewing method where I used a converted cooler MLT with a stainless braided hose to an electric Brew In A Bag (eBIAB) setup, which caused me for the first time to consider a curiously oft debated issue– whether or not squeezing the grain bag following the mash impacted the quality of the finished beer. Initially, the thought of squeezing a full bag of sopping grains suspended over my kettle wasn’t very appealing to me, largely because I prefer cleanliness and precision when brewing, and bag squeezing seemed like a good way to make a mess while simultaneously being less than predictable.

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Written by Franz Hofer for A Tempest in a Tankard

Ethereal cobblestone lanes, canals, medieval Flemish architecture, magnificent squares that recall the wealth and power of the merchant class, secluded parks, and even a few windmills make for an enchanting ambience you won’t find in many other cities. Bruges’ urban landscape and narrow alleys also conceal many a beer café gem where you can relax from the hard work of sightseeing and eating all that Belgian chocolate. Add to that the stately belfry, the Groeninge Museum with its Flemish art collection, and the Princely Beguinage Ten Wijngaarde in the shadow of De Halve Maan Brewery and you have more than a few reasons to unpack your luggage. An even longer stay opens up the possibility of day trips to some of the smaller beer towns in West Flanders to offset the sobriety of the First World War battlefields you might also visit. If time is tight, fear not: Bruges is a mere hour away from Brussels by train.

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A little background: Lemondrop is a new variety of hops, from the estimable Hopsteiner of Yakima, a lab that hybrids and propagates little miracles like this with the same casual brilliance that Mozart displayed in writing music. Of his musical gift, Wolfgang once said, “I write music as a sow piddles.”

Hopsteiner lights up ales “as a sow piddles”.

Lemondrop started its flamboyant little life as Hopsteiner Experimental Hop #01210. I first encountered it in a leading role in Deschutes’ unforgettable Chasin’ Freshies, back in late October of 2015, and as a supporting actor even earlier, in Stone’s groundbreaking “Delicious” IPA, in January of ’15. It’s a hybrid of the workhorse Cascade and USDA 19058 male…and what that latter hop may lack in poetry, it more than makes up in intense aromas and a very deliberate evocation of every atom of the hops world’s ability to express fresh, vivid lemons. This is very much a designed hop. It’s not at all accidental that this explosive bud makes your beer taste like LemonHeads candy and/or candied lemon rind. Lemon is one of those universally harmonious flavors that flatters and enhances almost anything combined with it. And that bright, fresh lemon character lit up both Chasin’ Freshies and Delicious in an unmistakably new way. Even craft beer newbies tasted those beers and detected something new and different.

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