Author: Professor Good Ales

When I started brewing about 3 years ago, I jumped right into all grain using 1 gallon kits then soon after bought a batch sparge setup with converted coolers for larger batches. I made many good beers, no doubt, but I found myself pining for a less complicated method, one that didn’t involve as much setup or clean-up but resulted in a finished product with similar quality. It wasn’t until a year or so later I learned about Brew In A Bag (BIAB) and, amid a run to win my homebrew club’s Homebrewer of the Year title, abruptly adopted it as my primary approach after buying a used e-BIAB system on a whim, sending me down a much simpler and less time consuming path.

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If you are familiar at all with the 2008 BJCP guidelines (AKA every competition for the past seven years) then you are mostly familiar with the major categories for the 2016 competition–with three differences:
1.American Pale Ale, American IPA, and Strong Stouts (Tropical, Foreign Extra, American, and Imperial) have all been split into separate categories to better distribute entries in highly impacted categories.
2.Specialty IPA is now a sub-category of IPA, so stop entering your Black/Brown/Red/White/Session IPAs in the Specialty Beer category! 🙂
3.Many of the new 2015 BJCP styles have been added to what are essentially the 2008 major categories, so go wild entering your Gose, Wheatwine, and Sahti (amongst others) as first-class styles.

Otherwise everything else should feel pretty familiar, just make sure you review the updated style guidelines; many of them have been significantly updated. For instance, English Pale Ales mention significantly less caramel character than previous years after the guideline committee admitted the older guidelines were based on old/oxidized imported examples (which increases perception of caramel).

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Innovation Brewing, a small craft brewer in Sylva, has won a significant round in the ongoing trademark dispute with Bell’s Brewery, the big Michigan-based brewer that filed a federal action against Innovation this spring. Bell’s aimed to stop Innovation from using its name, saying that the unregistered Bell’s ad slogan “bottling innovation since 1985” could lead to confusion among beer drinkers. The slogan isn’t used on any beer packaging.

In a Sept. 5 decision, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office ruled on a motion in the ongoing dispute. Here’s a snippet from the decision, and the “Opposer” referenced here is Bell’s”

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On average, I brew a couple batches every other week, all of which are for xBmts or The Hop Chronicles. A recent Saturday was one of these days, I brewed two 5 gallon batches simultaneously for a yet to be published xBmt. The next morning, I woke up early with my kids, made some breakfast, and did a few normal weekend chores. Right after lunch, my wife mentioned she had some errands to run, said she’d be out for a couple hours and would take my oldest daughter. My 2 year-old was napping at this point and my son wanted to ride his bike. That’s when the idea to try something I’d been thinking about for awhile struck– brew an all grain batch in as little time as possible. I set a goal for myself to be finished by the time my wife returned home, which she estimated would be approximately 2 hours. What follows is an account of how it went down, from grain to glass.

As my wife was prepping to leave, right about the time this brilliant idea came to me, I opened up BeerSmith and threw together a very simple SMaSH recipe. Inspired by the latest boil length xBmt findings, I chose to use some 2 year old German Pils malt I found sitting in the bottom of a bucket earlier that weekend. To that, I added Amarillo hops from the 2013 crop I’d been avoiding and a pack of Mangrove Jacks West Coast Yeast that expired nearly a year prior. This was bound to be glorious.

Short & Shoddy SMaSH 

Fermentables

Hops

Yeast

I chose to use the BIAB method for this project and collected the full volume of water, unfiltered and untreated, as my wife pulled out of the garage.

Start time: 10:05 AM

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Anheuser-Busch InBev on Wednesday formalized a deal to acquire its British-South African rival SABMiller for $107 billion, creating a gigantic global beer company in an era when many drinkers are imbibing beers from smaller brewers.

The companies had been weighing a deal since mid-September, with SABMiller rejecting several overtures from the Belgian firm before accepting the deal.

The acquisition gives Budweiser maker AB InBev a critical path into developing markets. SABMiller gets 35% of its revenue from Latin America and 34% from Africa.

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