I should start calling this the “Green Bottle Review Session,” but here we are.

We’re going to review a Stella Artois that I happened to find without the case punctured—no holes in it, so there should be no light that has gotten to it. As you can see, it pours fairly nice, as you would expect; nice carbonation with the bubbles; head retention’s moderate—went away fairly quickly, but it does leave a little white tiny head on the top.

Today we're going to talk a little bit about flaws. Most of this will be pretty evident. I made the slides pretty verbose, but I'll go through them anyway. One thing I really want to stress is a flaw is a flaw until it's not really a flaw. Sometimes these are just general comments, sensory comments. What may be a flaw in one beer may not be in another. The lesson really to anybody in beer, including my class, make sure it's really a flaw. The only way to do that is to know your styles.

Today we're going to talk about mashing. Mashing's an important process. This happens in the brewhouse, as opposed to malting, and also the other agriculture, drying hops and all that, so this is actually, you have your malt now in the brewhouse, and what you want to do is convert that malt into something that the yeast can eat, basically sugar water.

This is a small primer about judging beer. It's an entry level practical guide. For the pdf, click below.

Aroma

When you smell a beer, just like smelling a wine, you are searching for the essence of the beverage. Do you smell malts, hops, nothing? Sometimes you may smell something and not really know what it is. Therefore, one of the main things you need to develop is relating an aroma to a property in the beer.

By Jon Griffin

By Jon Griffin

One of the questions I am asked most often is, "What can I do with my spent grains?" Well, depending where you live, the answer can be anything from, not much, to, many different things. This article will focus on using your spent brewing grain for cooking, specifically making cookies and bread. Almost everyone can utilize this technique and if you don't bake (and you really should), you probably know someone who does.

Heineken has created a system that they claim cuts a pubs energy use by up to 90%. The new dispensing system dubbed SmartDispense was developed by Heineken as part of their green brewing initiative. No more lines to clean weekly One of the big complaints besides cooling beer is having to keep lines cleaned at least weekly. With the new system Heineken claims that the average bar can save 75% of the water and chemicals as well as beer that have been traditionally used during the cleaning process.

The history of beer is long and storied, and no one can say with certainty how it came to be. Most historians think that beer came about as an accident, and I agree with this. Unlike mead, or even wine, making beer is not really a straight forward process. It makes sense that it just “sorta happened.”

I decided to do some vegetarian cooking with beer and since my friend David Fox is a vegan, I decided to dedicate this post to his insanity, errr, dedication!

This is very simple and great for a weeknight. I have mentioned before that I love slow cookers and this vegan recipe takes advantage of that.

You can modify this as you see fit, but don't take out the beer! That would be alcohol abuse.

A lot of people don’t realize this but Belgium, like the rest of the world, is going through a renaissance in the beer world. There’s a lot of small brewers coming up. Even though there’s the big few that make a lot of the main beers that everybody knows, there’s a lot of new beer styles and breweries coming up in Belgium. The brewery we’re going to talk about today is called The Brouwerij, The Musketeers. They name all their beers in the typical craft beer way as kind of silly names. The Brouwerij was founded in the year 2000 by four brewing grads who found out that it really isn’t that easy to get a job in the brewing industry. They decided to form their own.