Beer Diary...

The homebrewing hobby is really taking off in Mexico and naturally, along with that popularity comes the competitive spirit. A national homebrewer and professional brewers competition took place in Mexico City last week and a record breaking 172 homebrew entries were submitted. Record breaking 172! What?  Yeah, for those involved in homebrewing in 'the States' this number seems pretty insignificant. The number of entries for the recent American Homebrew Association competition had a staggering 7,823 entries submitted by 1,733 homebrewers so the Mexican event appears to pale in comparison but the hobby is growing rapidly in Mexico and this seemingly small number represents what will surely be the beginnings of a craft beer movement that compares with the early days of craft beer in the U.S. These low numbers compare to the number of attendees that participated in Boulder and Denver in the early 1980's . And like looking into a crystal ball, I can see the futur...

Today I'm getting ready for next weeks beginner's homebrewing class. This means doing a little advanced brewing. I want to give the students all of the information they will need to brew an easy extract batch of beer at home and an important part of that lesson is the bottling process. So, in order to have beer to bottle next week, today I'm brewing 11 gallons of a simple German hefeweizen. In class we'll brew a dry malt extract hefeweizen recipe which consists of 4 lbs. of More Beer's Bavarian Wheat (DME 40C, 60% malted wheat and 40% malted barley) along with 1 lb. of cane sugar to help dry it out and a single addition of bittering hops for a 5 gallon batch. Then we'll bottle 5 gallons of the beer that I'm brewing today and each student will get to take home several bottles of the beer to condition at home and then after a couple weeks enjoy the fruits of their labors from class. yeast starter   The recipe I'm brewing today is very straight f...