Brewing Craft Classics (Feb-Mar 2021)

From our Love Handles department for the beer bars we enjoy most: This pioneering destination is for anyone seeking Baja flavors with cerveza artesanal in one of Mexico’s best beer cities.

A brief chapter in the latest adventures of the “Rarest Barrel,” pH1.

Courtesy of Russell Carpenter, head brewer at Rocket Frog Brewing Company in Sterling, Virginia, here is a homebrew-scale recipe for their flagship American brown ale that earned two GABF medals in the past three years.

Rocket Frog Brewing in Sterling, Virginia, has taken home two Great American Beer Festival medals in the past three years for its flagship brown ale, Wallops Island. Head brewer Russell Carpenter takes us up to the brew deck and walks us through it.

Courtesy of Claremont Craft Ales head brewer Brian Seffer, here is a homebrew-scale recipe based on the strong, hoppy red ale that won two gold medals in the past three years at the Great American Beer Festival.

Remember malt? Imperial red ale does. Brian Seffer, head brewer at Claremont Craft Ales in Claremont, California, explains the philosophy behind Happy Days, the 9.5 percent ABV red ale that brought home GABF gold in 2018—then did it again in 2020.

Patience! Trevor Rogers, cofounder of de Garde Brewing in Tillamook, Oregon, muses on the unique expression and slow work of spontaneous fermentation.

Ready to brew the Cadillac of pale lagers? This recipe has a straightforward infusion mash but gets some extra richness from layers of Munich and Vienna malts.

From our Love Handles series on beer bars we love, this session-focused, lager-loving pub inside a modern food hall features highly trained beer service and a range of culinary options.

This recipe is based on notes from Russian River’s Vinnie Cilurzo, who shared details from his most recent commercial-scale iteration of the late Mike “Tasty” McDole’s famous homebrew recipe.

It began as a striking reaction to industrial beer before fading into near-obscurity. Drew Beechum tells the tale of brown ale and makes the case for brewing up a big, malty hug.

This double-dry-hopped, hazy-juicy pale ale recipe from Tulsa’s American Solera is meant to be a showcase for whatever hops you want to try out and share with your pals.

Tulsa’s American Solera began with a serious devotion to coolships and mixed fermentation. It has since leaned with abandon into hazy IPAs, big adjunct stouts, fruited foeder lagers, and ... pumpkin seltzer?

When it comes to barleywine, the American way is to balance all that rich malt and alcoholic warmth with a bracing dose of hops. Here’s a partial-mash extract recipe for one you can drink fresh or lay down for months.

Looking ahead to late-summer pawpaw picking: This strong ale recipe from Jackie O’s in Athens, Ohio, features a robust wheat base as a platform for the tiki-drink flavors of this unusual fruit.

This tropical-flavored fruit from un-tropical places has a funny name and great potential for brewing some unusual fruited beers.

Cracking that barley kernel isn’t what it used to be. Today, brewers who want to dial in their grist and brew better, more efficient beer have a wide range of options. John M. Verive demystifies the increasingly complex options.

Courtesy of Kane Wille, head brewer at O’Connor Brewing in Norfolk, Virginia, this recipe for an imperial red IPA gets depth from layers of Proximity craft malts.

We all know how profoundly the types of malt we use can change what we brew. Less obvious is how independent brewing is changing how barley itself is being grown—leading, eventually, to exciting new options for brewers.

Whatever you want to call it, the West Coast–style red ale is different from other beers that try to capture it on their margins. If you’re not brewing these, you’re missing out.

MadeWest Brewing in Ventura, California, calls it a “light ale” or a “blonde ale.” Whatever you call it, it won gold at GABF in 2018 and silver in 2019. Aromatic hopping, cooler fermentation, and full attenuation are the keys to its super-crisp profile.

MadeWest Brewing in Ventura, California, won GABF gold in 2018 and silver in 2019 for its flagship blonde ale, Standard. Mike Morrison, cofounder and head brewer, sketches out its origins and lays out the schematics of this extraordinary ordinary beer.

Few experiences in brewing are more rewarding—or make for better practice—than bringing some undersung, underloved, old-fashioned beer styles to life in your own brewhouse. Josh Weikert makes the case for learning, drinking, and brewing the canon.

Enjoy carefully curated, cared-for beers with brunch in Beantown.

Here is Annie Johnson‘s partial-mash recipe for an English-style barleywine, getting classic depth from judicious caramel malts and east Kent Goldings hops.

Whether English or American or breaking new ground, barleywines are the Cadillacs of the ale world. Can you brew a great one with extracts? Of course you can. Annie Johnson breaks it down in our ongoing series on extract-brewing exceptional beers.

In which we ride an unhealthy fascination with melted cheese to a wild-beer frontier ... because nobody’s ever thought to combine beer and cheese, right? (Well, maybe not like this.) Prepare yourselves for a new portmanteau.

Sour and wild beers exist on a complex plane of myriad flavors and aromas produced by bacteria, yeast, ingredients, and by-products. Randy Mosher breaks down the building blocks of what we sense, to help us identify what we enjoy.

Jean Van Roy, head brewer at Brasserie Cantillon in Brussels and heir to a 120-year-old lambic-brewing legacy, discusses his emotional approach and connection to spontaneously fermented beer—and his view on the new wave inspired by traditional methods.

“Kelvin is one of our favorite beers,” says Shawn Bainbridge, cofounder of Halfway Crooks. He describes the beer as “a happy place” for the “finest German hops and smoked malt.”

With dogged attention to detail, Halfway Crooks in Atlanta are surviving and thriving by playing the long game: “You have a beer at night and then wake up the next morning and go full force again.”

Sour beer may be the primary focus for Jay Goodwin, cofounder of The Rare Barrel, but—like most brewers—his taste isn’t limited to a single style. For his Pick 6, Jay pushes out of his brewing comfort zone to focus on a genre he loves: pilsner.

Brewed once per year at Urban Chestnut’s brewery in Wolnzach, in the heart of Bavaria’s hop-growing Hallertau region, here is a homebrew-scale recipe for the strong, malty, mahogany-colored beer named for the town’s 8th-century founder.

For advice on brewing a great doppelbock, we turned to an experienced Bavarian brewer: Florian Kuplent, cofounder and brewmaster of Urban Chestnut in St. Louis and the Hallertau.

The best doppelbocks eschew excessive sweetness and embrace balance—despite offering deep malt complexity and festive, brain-tickling strength. Here are five we love.

Monkish hospitality and devotion gave way to modern commercialism over a few centuries, but this Bavarian product that evolved along the way still has the power to nourish and amaze.

Open-source collaborations such as All Together IPA and Black is Beautiful, meant to raise funds and awareness for specific causes, were among the brighter highlights of an otherwise challenging 2020.