Monday Beer Club – Meeting #16

The goal for this meeting was to try to get a better sense of hop bitterness. In the past, I’ve often confused hop bitterness (from hops added during the boil, leading to high “IBU”s) and alpha acids (also from hops, but added later in the process, so not resulting in high “IBU”s). Confusing, right? Two

Monday Beer Club – Meeting #8.5

Monday is as much a state of mind as it is a day of the week. So I figure it’s fine for Monday Beer Club to meet on a Tuesday. And since we’re stretching the boundaries today, we also met at a “guest brewery” – Sawdust City in Gravenhurst Ontario. Here is the agenda for

Hops All The Way Down

Hops are an essential ingredient in all modern beer, but this hasn’t always been case. Originally, beer was flavoured with “gruit”, a mixture of various herbs and flowers. But from the 13th to the 15th century, hops replaced gruit as the preferred bittering agent in beer. This happened for a variety of reasons. Taxation played