Funk + Fruit (Apr-May 2020)

From the Love Handles department of our April-May 2020 issue, here are three of our favorite beery destinations, from Florida to Washington state via Middle Franconia.

This recipe from Kelly Montgomery, Brink Brewing’s cofounder and head brewer, and his friend Mike Rodocker won a gold medal at the 2018 U.S. Open Beer Championships.

Informed by the Belgian tradition but rooted in their own places, here are five beers brewed and blended in the manner of lambic and gueuze.

Inspired by traditional lambic brewing, here is homebrewer Kevin Foster’s recipe for his turbid-mashed base beer. Evolving variations on this recipe are key components of his award-winning annual blends.

Kevin Foster, based in Atlanta, Georgia, won a gold medal for his gueuze-style blend at the American Homebrewers Association Nationals in 2018. Here, he talks about his year-to-year process for brewing, aging, and blending wild beers.

This unusual gose-cider hybrid gets apple-cinnamon coziness from freshly ground mahlab and a hefty portion of cider concentrate. Lactose and lactic acid add sweetness and tartness to promote the apple, while mahlab adds nutty-spicy accents.

It’s a nutty spice, but it comes from a fruit. Popular as a baking ingredient in the Middle East, the dried seeds of St. Lucie cherries can also work really nicely, as it turns out, in beer.

As a serial entrant in major beer competitions, Brink Brewing in Cincinnati, Ohio, has been winning national medals with classic styles, turning them into local success.

Not flashy but sublime, refreshing, and comforting—especially on a hot day—here are a few of the world's finest wheat beers.

Here are the OGs—a few of the most refined versions of the most complex drink in the world.

Try to brew it if you want—many have tried—but few beers belong to their own place more than traditional Belgian gueuze.

If ever you buy specialty malts specifically for a batch, let it be for this one. Fresh crystal and chocolate malts really make it sing, and at such a light ABV, you’ll be able to enjoy all of that flavor by the dimpled mug full.

Joe Stange, managing editor of Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine® and co-author of Good Beer Guide Belgium, explores how that country’s wilder-side beers have continued to evolve.

Want to brew a fruit beer greater than the sum of its parts? To show how one might match a fruit to a particular style, here is Josh Weikert's recipe for an apricot-flavored American pale ale.

Want to add fruit to your beer? Okay. But first ask yourself this important question: Why?

In this Learning Lab, we tempt fate by inviting oxidation exposure and punishing our wort with hot-side aeration. Will it ruin our beer, or is the threat exaggerated?

Let’s get rustic: Justin Wright and Justin Kruger, a.k.a. "Two Fat Justins," show how French and Belgian country ales can lighten and brighten savory main dishes, while a splash of cherry lambic adds complex juiciness to a simple berry crumble.

Here is a homebrew-scale recipe for KC Bier’s reverently brewed, Bavarian-style helles, which we here at Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine® named one of our Best 19 Beers of 2019.

Sticking stubbornly to classical German ingredients and methods—from decoction to spunding—the brewers at KC Bier are growing their business on full-flavored, bang-on lagers and weissbier.

We've heard the argument: Single-bacteria sour beers—so-called kettle sours—are detrimental to the success of more traditional, mixed-culture beers. But for Bret Kollman Baker of Cincinnati’s sour-focused Urban Artifact, the two coexist peacefully.

For a price, automated cell counters can save valuable lab time otherwise spent peering into microscopes and counting manually.

Here we depict the most-grown hops (by acres harvested) in the Pacific Northwest from 2014 to 2019, showing the top 10 each year. The width of each band represents the number of acres grown that year; one inch is about 6,500 acres.

Mixed-culture beers run the gamut from lighter, nuanced, farmhouse-style ales to acid-forward wild ales and lambic beers. Here, five respected brewers share favorites from these broad categories that influenced them or exemplify the best of today.

As a rule, the Bayerische Staatsbrauerei Weihenstephan doesn’t open its books to share exact recipes. However, at our request, Brewmaster Tobias Zollo generously agreed to share a recipe based on the world classic Weihenstephaner Hefeweissbier.

As a root of civilization and the soft heart of some of the world’s most drinkable beers, wheat deserves more love.

Matt Lincecum, founder of Fremont Brewing in Seattle, has a taste for delicate, beautifully constructed beers. He has intentionally packed this dream sixer with a heavy focus on the past decade.

Try culturing up dregs from a favorite mixed-fermentation beer to brew this farmhouse ale, a balanced frame for funky depth.

Farmhouse brewing is a huge barn, with room for all sorts of creatures. How many of them, though, help you make really drinkable beer? Here, Drew Beechum lays out a path toward restraint.

“Here is a recipe for a typical helles of the sort we like to brew," says John Lenzini, president and head of brewery operations for Schilling Beer. "It gets enough character from the raw materials and process to create both complexity and sessionability.”

In the little town of Littleton, traditional Schilling Beer and its brash Resilience offshoot are deepening their roots.

For the service side of your home brewery or home bar—to get your glasses "beer clean" or carry fresh homebrew on the go—here are our picks from Issue 38.

Don’t expect barnyard flavors here: When *Brett* is the sole fermenting agent, the result should be relatively clean.

Here is our review of the new book by Lars Marius Garshol, whose research on traditional kveik, raw beer, and other traditional techniques has shifted the paradigm on farmhouse brewing.

Phil Markowski, cofounder and brewmaster of Two Roads Brewing in Stratford, Connecticut, wrote the book on farmhouse ales. Here he looks back on that influential work, pondering the expanding universe of knowledge about farmhouse brewing.

Doesn’t seem like that long ago that we could count the types of dry yeast available on two hands. However, recently, some new and unusual types of dry yeast have arrived to give brewers some versatility.