Beers are most commonly divided into two great classes, ales and lagers, depending on the yeast strain used in fermentation. But most ale and lager yeasts are cultured, with many hybrids and sub-types and sometimes the classification is a little forced. There’s one type, however, that clearly stands apart: Lambics. True Lambics are made only [...]

Beer is essentially four basic ingredients: water, malt, yeast and hops that are boiled, cooled and stored to ferment. The last, hops, are the flowering cone of a viney plant related to cannabis. But without any of the drug that makes marijuana popular. It can be grown in almost any climate with adequate water and [...]

Beer makers sometimes envy the popularity of wine. Though beer making is several thousand years older than wine – some brew recipes go back 8,000 years – in modern times it has rarely achieved the distinction of a fine wine. Rarely do hostesses ask ‘Would you care for an after dinner beer?’ All that may [...]

Found a 50-year old Budweiser can in your grandfather’s garage? Don’t throw it out – it might be worth $300 or more on eBay. Got a 1943 Schlitz bottle, with the label intact? If it has a ‘Buy War Bonds’ stamp you might be looking at a $500 ‘antique’. Even tin bottle tops can fetch [...]

Wine clubs have been around longer than the Internet, but they blossomed there. Providing full-color catalogs via mail-order is slow and expensive and expanding your customer base is more difficult. The web made possible daily changes to product, potentially instant error correction and price changes and the possibility of reaching a worldwide audience cheaply. Less [...]

After all the equipment is prepared you’ll need ingredients. Two and a half to three kilos (six or seven pounds) of malt extract will serve well. There’s an endless variety of types and brands and you’ll want to experiment. A few dozen grams (a couple of ounces) of hops will be added to most recipes. [...]

As with any home project, preparation is half the key to success in homebrewing. Everything should be clean and well organized so you can carry out the steps with confidence in the final result. But what is ‘everything’?

Water might be the most varied chemical compound on the planet. Plain old H2O is the same anywhere, of course. But brewing with pure water is not only expensive, but leads to poor beer – flat, stale and downright incorrect. That’s because the dozen or more elements or compounds found in natural sources contribute greatly [...]

The history of beermaking is a story of invention, dedication and pride. Though winemaking is a very old art – perhaps beginning with the Phoenicians 2,600 years ago – beermaking is older than farming. As far back as 8000 BC, women gathered wild grain and used it to make beer, depending on spontaneous, air-borne yeast [...]

Sometimes a problem is cleverly turned into an advantage. The world is indeed fortunate that barley is good for little more than making beer. But for that, it is excellently suited. Barley is a cereal grain, similar to wheat or oats, that doesn’t mill well into flour for bread. But crushed and dried in a [...]