Mash

There are many kinds of dark beer around the world, but there’s one that stands out as profoundly different from the others—and it features a deep, caramelized flavor that can only come from a nice, hot oven.

From its outpost an hour outside of downtown Chicago, Art History has quietly built momentum by focusing on a range of Czech- and German-inspired lagers as well as bitters, milds, and other English styles. In this episode, head brewer Greg Browne and cofounder Tom Rau share their approach to making traditional beers cool again.

Crack some grains and cook some rice if you want, but attacking cold IPA with the partial-mash method is simple. Let the pedants argue about whether it’s a style—we’re too busy brewing and drinking it.

From our Illustrated Guide to Homebrewing: For those jumping into all-grain brewing at home, here’s what to know about mashing for success.

From our Illustrated Guide to Homebrewing, here’s what to know when you’re moving from extracts to taking greater control of your grist, mash, and lauter.

In this excerpt from our Illustrated Guide to Homebrewing, we discuss brewing with extracts and steeping with specialty grains—and why there is much to be said for embracing them at home.

Scott Janish, cofounder of Sapwood Cellars and author of The New IPA, explains how mash-hopping—especially before fermenting with yeasts that are engineered to unlock bound thiols—can add a significant aroma boost to your IPAs.

Old-school malt layers, New World hop flavors, and that beautiful red-amber color... Love live the red IPA.

In this throwback IPA style that recalls the beauty of malt—both visually and in the flavor—you can go with a complex, layered all-grain grist. Or, you can get there quicker (and just as beautifully red) with an intentional approach to extract brewing.

You don’t need an industrial Japanese brewery—nor even an all-grain homebrew system—to make a clean, light-bodied, refreshing rice lager ideal for sushi and summertime.

From malt choices to mash out, Altstadt head brewer Craig Rowan explains how they mill and step-mash their medal-winning Lager.

Ready to build a fire and brew a traditional stone beer at home? Grab your tongs and get ready to rock.

Mashing with hot rocks isn’t just an antiquated quirk of a few farmhouse brewers. In fact, we may be able to blame the technique for the founding of human civilization.

The idea of making beer with flaming-hot rocks conjures an indelible mental image, yet the common understanding of what “steinbier” was is almost totally wrong. Here, Lars Marius Garshol explains the methods of a lost farmhouse style.

Extract brewing provides a more-than-capable canvas for getting creative with the unusual fruits that arrive this time of year. Annie Johnson breaks it down.

Here is Annie Johnson’s recipe for a rich, complex, adjunct-free imperial stout that mellows and improves with some time in the cellar.

Maybe that P in IPA can stand for “pitch-black.” Once again helping us to extract the most characterful beer from extract brewing, Annie Johnson has the details on Cascadian dark ale, aka American black ale or black IPA.

Die-hards will say you need to go all-grain to brew a great pilsner. They’ll also say you need strict temperature control. That’s fine—we don’t have to share our beer or our tricks with them.

Josh Pfriem, brewmaster and cofounder of pFriem Family Brewers in Hood River, Oregon, breaks down their approach to Kölsch-Style Ale—an exercise in precision and a gold-medal winner at last year’s Great American Beer Festival.

With saison’s high attenuation, delicate body, fermentation-driven complexities, and lasting foam, it would be easy to assume that extract brewers are at a disadvantage. Not necessarily, as Annie Johnson explains.