Josh Weikert

The “keeping beers” of French Flanders can be found in a spectrum running from blonde to brown—with corresponding shifts in the hops-malt balance—but *ambrée* is arguably the classic hue.

• Make Your Best
• Bière de Garde

With today’s advanced hop products, there are no silver bullets. Yet they can be powerful tools in the brewery—if used carefully, intentionally, and while heeding the advice of fellow brewers.

• Hops
• Hop Products
• Flowable Hop Products

With its bright, fruity esters but restrained phenolic spice, the Ardennes ale strain is the perfect yeast for this sneaky-strong Belgian-style blonde ale.

• Beer Recipe
• Belgian Ale
• Belgian-Style Blonde Ale

This blonde ale is fresh and clean, using the “Belgian” character as an accent but not the headline. Brew it for your next party and bust out the chalices—and when it kicks, you’ll know that it lived its short, happy life to the fullest.

• Make Your Best
• Belgian Ale
• Blonde Ale

This honey ESB makes for a fun ride on the palate: Between the ample crystal malts, the honey flavors—buckwheat is rich and spicy—and yeast, you end up with a lot of candy, strawberry, earthy, spicy, and malty flavors.

• Beer Recipe
• ESB
• Bitter

Highly fermentable yet often quite flavorful, with many types available, honey is the queen bee of alternative sugars in the brewhouse. So, let’s ponder how it can shine in conjunction with a particular base style—in this case, an ESB.

• Make Your Best
• Homebrewing
• Honey

Here’s a fairly classic take on an American seasonal tradition: a solid amber-brown ale that includes both the real (pumpkin) and the evocative (pie spice).

• Beer Recipe
• Pumpkin Beer
• Spice/Herb/Vegetable Beer

Summer ends too soon, vacations are over too soon, fall seasonals hit the shelves too soon—all reminders that while it may feel too soon to drink a pumpkin beer, it’s just the right time to brew one.

• Make Your Best
• Autumn Seasonal
• Pumpkin Beer

Made annually from the pears picked off the tree out back, this recipe for a dry perry represents how I do it at home.

• Beer Recipe
• Perry
• Cider

Perry is hard to find and hard to make, and neither the fruit nor the wildlife is likely to cooperate. Yet that challenge—along with perry’s distinctive character—is a big part of what makes it worth pursuing.

• Fruit Fermentation
• Perry
• Cider

A bit of wheat is hard to beat—and it shows up in a bunch of today’s most popular beers and styles, even if most drinkers have no idea it’s there. Well beyond wheat beers and weizens, the golden grain has become one of the most useful ingredients in the modern craft brewery.

• Wheat
• Grains
• Malt

Meant to represent the kind of pale lagers that were brewed by the likes of John Wagner, who brewed the first lager in the United States, this is kind of like German or Czech Pilsner but includes some local variability and flair.

• Lager
• Pre-Prohibition Lager
• Pale Lager