Thursday, October 11, 2012

Introduction to Dave's Homemade Beer Blog aka "The Beer Whisperer"

What is it that makes great beer? Is it the label? The advertisements of elvis costumes, blokes running around in the desert or man-sweat? The size of the marketing behind it or the level of drunkenness in the brainstorming session?

Or is it the yeast, hops, malt and water? Ingredients, you say? You're joking, right?

I don't kid myself of being a master brewer or anything like that, or even
 a wannabe drunken apprentice. After many years of making my own beer, with all its successes and failures (who would think that one could use too much orange peel in beer? Go figure), i thought it time to share my experiences, so others can learn from my considerable catalogue of mistakes.

What ultimately dawned on me was that the quality of the beer is due in most part to the quality of its ingredients. That home brewed beer is much cheaper than the swill, er, commercial varieties, makes the idea of using premium ingredients all the more attractive. Of course, the cleanliness, the care and the temperature are all vitally important, but you still can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear (who was the fool who tried that?).

And of course, KISS: keep it simple, stupid! (refer to Exhibit A - the aforementioned orange beer).

Of course, i realised that i could not compete with the extreme brewers, but who wants to grow their own barley? I've tried semi-mash brewing, but to my chagrin i've found that it simply represents more opportunity to screw things up. Sure, it can make your beer fresher, but for a lot more work. The simple fact is, a lot of home brewers are interested in nothing more than making cheap beer, but that's no excuse to make worse swill than made by the mass-producers. As i've found, some top-shelf ingredients can make beer magically better for virtually no more effort apart from simply buying the stuff.

Anyway, i will be posting about how my various efforts have turned out, but will try and avoid the inane updates of how the stuff smells in the fermenter and other twitter-like asininity.

And the best part of making beer? Well, duh! Now that i mention it, where did i put my bottle?

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