Your hands are sticky with the golden resin. There are shopping bags full of green cones in a spare room, waiting to be used or dried and stored for later.

My personal favorites from the Vermont Brewers Festival.

How dare AB-InBev use this innocent Canadian brewery as its way into the craft beer world?

American pale ales are a crowd pleaser and this one from the upstart Maine Beer Company aims to hit the right notes.

It fits snug in a koozie, makes that satisfying psssfchik when it opens and can be crushed on your head. Really, what’s not to like about cans?

Impatience is not a virtue when brewing. I know this, OK? But now that I’ve got my Mondays free, I just don’t know what to do if I’m not doing beer stuff.
So I bottled the Switch Road Pale Ale I made two weeks ago. When I transferred it last week, it was kind of weird. Holleee cats — the scent of grass clippings soaked in kitty piss. A week of dry-hopping appears to have cured it, though, and it’s smelling fresh and citrusy now.
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Came out nice. The gravity didn’t drop …

I know what this looks like. But I swear, I’m not smoking the contents, nor am I baking them into brownies.

No, this is serendipity in a freezer bag, a wonderful homebrewer’s discovery while walking the dog. I still have no idea what kind of hops they are. But today, I brewed up a pale ale to see just what they could do.
I’m betting on the conservative side. I am assuming an alpha acid content no greater than 3.5%. This is because I’m a hop head and like to be pleasantly …

Just as I was ready to swear off using fruit and other adjuncts, I sampled some homebrews that restored my good faith in and hopes for experimental beer.
This brewer who we’ll call “Bob” (because that’s his actual name) broke out several special brews, including a honey ginger lager, cherry porter and jalapeno pilsner that were all things to behold. I’d tried using ginger, honey and jalapenos in the past — with mixed results — and the raspberry basil porter I made in February convinced me to give fruit a rest …

Cue the Etta James … spring has arrived, at last.

Saturday was 60-degrees and sunny, which meant it was time to do my first-ever all-grain batch. We did a pale ale — the “good life pale ale” straight out of Papazian — mostly because it had all the malts and hops I could find at my local homebrew supplier. For the most part, no substitutions and though I got stumped once, I think it worked out well. Here’s the low-down:
9 lbs. pale malt (6-row)
1 lb. 11 oz. Munich malt
10 oz. Crystal …