Happy New Year! It sure has been a while. 2011 was a crazy year, having more ups and downs than most of the years before it. As far as beer goes, we made some great beers, attended our first National Homebrewers Conference in San Diego, and settled on plans to move to Adelaide, Australia to open our brewpub in a [...]

This year Big Brew Day fell on Brent’s scheduled weekend to brew; this was good for two reasons! 1. Brent was the one running around the house trying to brew while 20 friends were hanging out on the patio & in the backyard, and 2. I got to get in the kitchen and turn out some great beer-themed food! I [...]

Last weekend I participate in Fuggled’s International Homebrew Project; aimed to get some hombrewer’s together around the world to pick a recipe, brew it and then blog about it This year’s recipe was a remake of a 1933 Barclay Perkins Milk Stout. Frankly, before this came up, I’d never heard of it; shameful to be sure! Kristen England from the BJCP [...]

Those of you who follow me on Twitter have had your ears bent about this topic quite a bit lately, but it’s so exciting I just have to share it, you know?!? I’ve been slowly (veeeerrrryy slowly) chugging my way through Chris White & Jamil Zainasheff’s book “Yeast” recently; it’s fascinating stuff, and has inspired me to try my hand at [...]

I expanded my world a lot in 2010. After starting this blog, I went back to my dormant Twitter account, and really started trying to connect with people as passionate about beer, wine & food as I am; it wasn’t hard. I barely had to swing a cat and I found hundreds of people who felt like I did! Twitter [...]

It’s been a long time coming, and last night the Tequesta Brewing Co. finally opened its doors to the public for a “soft” opening. I use the term soft very loosely because as you can see below, this was probably the most packed soft opening I’ve seen in my life! As I wrote about in July the Corner Cafe and Brewery [...]

Life has been crazy this past month (thanksgiving, finals, surgery etc….), and I failed to complete our DC/DE trip update… I’m sorry! I’ll pick up where I left off; Delaware! I think this picture pretty well sums up what a great trip we’re having at this point : I was definitely a little wary dragging my parents out to Delaware [...]

Day #3 We had big plans to spend most of the morning in the Smithsonian Museum of American History and then hit the Georgetown waterfront for a late lunch. After a couple of hours wandering the amazing exhibits, my folks were done; too much walking the day before called for a lazy, sun soaked, beer in hand afternoon by the river. [...]

I love Lagunitas’ beers. One of my most memorable craft beer epiphanies was tasting Hop Stoopid for the first time and being one of only two people at the tasting who liked it. Actually “liked” is not a good way to describe it; I did cartwheels over it, angels chorused and I think I almost cried. It was the moment I [...]

Day #2 in D.C. saw us hit the National Mall starting at the Captiol Building and a walk down to the Lincoln Memorial and back. Amazingly, even though Brent grew up in New Jersey (so close!), he had never done this either! It was quite a walk, probably 6 miles or so, so we’d built up quite the appetite.  Another [...]

Joey Redner of Cigar City Brewing posted of the company’s local-government-induced woes on their blog this morning. Last week they went to have their wet-zoning permit renewed – which should have been a cakewalk – and ran into several councillors who ran red flags up over unsubstantiated claims of neighborhood disturbances and increased crime rates. The vote ended tied 3-3. [...]

So, first things first. An apology for being gone from the blog-o-sphere for so long! School has been busy, my folks were here for a month from Australia and we took a great trip to D.C. and Delaware. D.C. and DE were great! We got to drink a myriad of beers we don’t get to drink at home, saw some [...]

So we left the big city D.C behind, and headed out to Rehoboth Beach, DE. Friends had lent us their condo for the week and we were planning on having a relaxing old time, along with a couple of brewery tours thrown in for good measure! First stop after dumping our luggage – Dogfish Head Brewpub! We tried a couple [...]

Today’s guest post is by Kristina from Twinkies & Gin. If you have kids (or not), and hate people who are holier-than-thou (who doesn’t?), then you should definitely be reading their blog; these ladies are irreverent and downright hysterical! ___________________________________________________________________________________________ I always hated beer snobs. Chatter about hops, fermentation and insidious grains filled me with a seething rage as Pete and I [...]

A couple of months ago I competed in round 2 of the Iron Brewer homebrew competition; this seemed to garner my homebrew some more interest than they normally gather. People I follow on Twitter approached me for homebrew trades because they wanted to taste it; really?! That’s cool Barry (@BitzyBrew on Twitter) got in touch to trade some of his homebrew [...]