Missing the Point

Last week Dave Bailey at HardKnott posted a link on Twitter to his new blog post entitled ‘Beer Drinking Women Are Not Attractive’, adding “there we go, set off the new year with a gender issue, why not.” That blog post was intended to present a contrasting point of view to an earlier blog post from Ding  entitled ‘Women in Beer Culture’.

Dave’s post was supposed to be supportive of women and to encourage discussion around the subject of ‘gender issues in beer’. But it didn’t have a positive effect on women. It had a negative effect. In fact, it generated sufficient offence that the author resorted to taking the post and all comments down (along with a subsequent post, also about women and beer) two days later. One female beer drinker commented on Twitter that she’d never even heard of HardKnott beers but she certainly wouldn’t be drinking them now.

Judging beer - what's the right way?

We've had some thought-provoking experiences with judging beers recently, it's a bit of a recurring theme.

Sainsbury's Great British Beer Hunt 2013 - The Grand Final

I was a bit late to the Sainsbury’s GBBH party. In truth I was unaware it even existed until this summer. But the more I heard about it, the more I liked the idea and I was determined to try as many of the 20 finalists as possible once they reached the stores – in the interests of experiencing more British beers. But getting hold of all 20 of the entries proved to be a challenge as some of you may have discovered for yourselves.

Award-winning homebrewers

Just in case you managed to miss this yesterday: one of our beers won an award at the UK National Homebrew Competition.  Our Declassified NZ (a black IPA brewed solely with NZ hops) took third prize in the Specialty round. 

We were very pleased that something we brewed would be judged worthy of an award in a brewing competition. It provides some validation that we are doing the right things. Although, if anything, it makes us want to keep improving our beers rather than just sitting back and being content with what we've achieved.

However, we did have stop and think and say HANG ON A MINUTE, that award-winning beer was only the fourth beer we ever brewed. In fact, if not for the change in the hop profile (switching US Pacific North West hops for NZ hops) it is the same as the second beer we brewed (which was our first all-grain brew). So how did we manage to brew something so good (relatively speaking) so early on in our brewing history?

I was reminded of an article I read on the Brewdog blog about homebrewing a few months back. One quote really stuck in my mind:

Russell: "Do as many home brews as possible. After about 100 attempts the beer will start to taste good! There's a lot more control in modern breweries so don't beat yourself if your first few attempts don't even taste like beer; it's tricky! Be prepared for plenty of trial and error."

I remember thinking at the time, 'how bad could you be at home brewing that you would need to do 100 brews before producing something good?' I have to assume this figure is an exaggeration. But surely such statements would be more likely to put off potential home brewers than to encourage them to try it for themselves? It sat slightly oddly in an article that appeared, on the face of it, to be encouraging people to try home-brewing.

The first thing we ever brewed was an all extract pale ale. We fully expected it to be awful but actually it tasted nice. Our second brew was all grain, the original Declassified Black IPA. We thought it tasted pretty good, even if we say so ourselves... Two brews later we produced something that won an award.

So I guess what we're trying to say is, home brewing isn't rocket science but it is a scientific process. We're both scientists by training. So we approached brewing like a science project: we educated ourselves as much as possible beforehand, we documented as we went, we reflected after, and we learned from our mistakes. If you've never brewed before, you're not going to brew a good beer by accident. But if you're willing to learn and you try your best you should get something that tastes good in less than 100 attempts. ;)

However, if you're not of a scientific bent, please don't be put off. You can still make good beer without a detailed understanding of the science behind it. However, don't be surprised once the home-brewing bug bites, that you'll want to know more. Once you starting learning more about the science of beer, you're on the road to turning good beer into great beer. 

Thanks to everyone who has tried our beers and offered us feedback and constructive criticism. We have appreciated that and found it really useful.

It had to happen

I finally met a saison I didn’t love.

Brewing with the Beavers

A fortunate meeting at a 'beer and food pairing' event gave us the chance to visit one of our favourite London breweries: Beavertown Brewery. This is our tale of an early start, loads of hops, and getting a close up view of how the pros brew beer.

The Warmer Line Pub Crawl (3rd November 2012)

This is a write up of the Northern Line pub crawl, we did in November 2012 and which Ems first published on her personal Live Journal blog back then. People have asked us about pub crawls around London since then, so we thought it was worth re-publishing it on our blog so people can learn from our experiences and avoid making the mistakes that we did. Enjoy!