Beertography: BrewKeep App Launch Party

With Dale’s Pale Ale in hand and a Sam Adam’s Utopias up for grabs, I made my way to Fell’s Point, Baltimore, to capture the launch party festivities for a new “Pandora for beer” app called BrewKeep. The launch buzzed in the neon air of Max’s Taphouse (who seriously managed to secure the domain “Maxs.com” which amazes my inner nerd), and, I’d venture, everyone who attended had a pretty good time. I didn’t win the Utopias, but I did make some new bearded, beery friends (and some without beards, too).

As usual, I’ll let the photos do all the real narrative work.

(Full disclosure: founders Sean and Matt lubricated my photographic adventure with a couple of free beers.)

Beer Review: Southern Tier Warlock

I made a promise to myself last year, after I burped the last of my cinnamon and spice binge into the ether. I swore, to the old gods and the new, to my inner demons and guardian angels, to all the demigods of diet and phantasms of flavor. I vowed and declared and committed not to give in to the siren song of gourd whispering to me on the autumn wind, that this year in beer would prove different.

I made an oath in those dark winter months, in the foggy hangover of post holiday splurge. I signed it with the alcohol in my blood and the sugar on my breath. A contract with one a relatively simple clause: do not drink any pumpkin beer until at least October 1st, 2014.

It was not an agreement I entered into lightly, for my weak, mortal side craves the succulent orange flesh in pie, in coffee, in all unholy abominations of pumpkin and product. I know it’s wrong to lust after brown sugar and nutmeg, to let a cultivar cultivate my destiny, but I’m just a man. Seasonal creep sneaks and slithers onto me, seductively suggesting I take a nice clean bite from that orange apple, season and weather be damned.

At first, I held strong. Summer’s insistence on postponing his vacation to the other side of the planet gave me strength. The orange, brown, and black of the labels did not sway my conviction, and I walked past them boldly, bravely, to other, less obnoxious fermented fare. The Pumpking held no regal power over me, the Great’er proved lesser. IPAs bolstered my resolve, and Marzens marched across my tongue and down my throat in a delicious cavalcade of beverages that were decidedly free from pumpkin. I thought I could do it. Thought the vine fruit would be defeated, left to bake until its time was ripe some time near Halloween.

But such dark energy is not to be denied. The pumpkin, knowing my devotion to the cause, summoned his darkest agents, the most twisted and malevolent of his creations, to bring me back into the fold. Little by little, day by day, the jolly jack-o-lantern chipped away at me. Every sign of Fall, every crunchy brown leaf, every slight whiff of cloves or ginger fed the entropy, increased my desire to sup at the forbidden table, sip from the forbidden cup.

From the soul of his stout, inky black soul, he captured, raptured, and ultimately tore my pledge in two. I let his eight armed ABV wash over me, surrendering, suffering, savoring.

I drank the Warlock. I broke the oath.

I am the warlock. I am the oathbreaker.

And now as his energy surges through my veins, I know that no matter how silly or sickening, how gimmicky or gauche, I will give into him, because hot damn, I love pumpkin flavored crap.

“Stars, hide your fires; Let not light see my black and deep desires.” ― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

The Session #91 – Forgotten Friday: My First Belgian

(I missed the last few Sessions due to travel and exhaustion and illness, but I’m back! This month’s topic is “My First Belgian” hosted by Breandán and Elisa over at Belgian Smaak.)

Occasionally, the many moving parts of my writing life line up in a perfect row, like some rare celestial event where arcane energies mingle and a portal to other worlds opens very briefly. As the Session falls on a day I had other writing plans, I can feel the gears of my mind click and sync, suddenly whirring together as one as the clutch reengages. I typically write “Forgotten Friday” posts about places and items that have been lost in plain sight, but today, I’m using the literal definition of my favorite nostalgic infinitive: “to forget.”

This month’s topic asks me to recall the first Belgian beer I ever managed to sneak down my gullet. The problem is, no matter how far I stretch my brain, how many stories I pull from the depths of my hippocampus, how many bottles and labels I recall on the selves of the dozens of fridges of my life, I cannot remember my first Belgian beer. I can remember the first beer; it was a Boddingtons Pub Ale, at the dinner table with my parents, around 7th grade. Although, photo evidence says I probably drank a bit earlier than that (thanks, Dad), that’s my first fermented memory, the first time I remember drinking beer.

I also remember thinking it tasted like bitter instant oatmeal that someone had added way too much water to, followed by a quick internal question, “why would anyone want to drink this stuff?”

Don’t judge, it was the 80s in England. Just look at that red table and white leather couch.

If I had to guess, my first was probably one of the big boy Belgian beers: Duvel, Hoegaarden, maybe even a stray bottle of Delirium Tremens left to age in the back of our family fridge after a party. It’s possible, in all its wasted decadence, that my first Belgian was Trappist; my mom would often keep a bottle of Chimay Red on hand during the holiday season, for reasons I don’t quite understand, because neither she nor my dad drank it. But I cant’ say for sure. It’s a black void in my mental vault, one of those things I never built a place for in my memory palace, that will probably be forever lost in the deep dark ocean of my memories.

I’ll confess; I probably don’t remember because I’ve never taken to Belgian beer. I’ve homebrewed it, tried countless styles and brands, forced my tongue into a steel-cage death match with funky fermentation, hoping to one day emerge bloody but victorious, the Champion of Brussels. While I’ve gotten in a few good punches, I’m still likely to brace myself before taking a sip of saison, clench my jaw when quaffing a quad. I appreciate the artistry and heritage of many Belgian breweries, but something in the bready unmistakable yeast character of Belgian beer is antithetical to what my taste buds want.

While that may seem tragic (and trust me, for years I was convinced there was a fundamental flaw in my mouth), it has allowed me to finally accept a reality a lot of modern beer enthusiasts forget, try to dance around to avoid appearing unlearned or inexperienced: it’s OK to not like a certain style of beer. It’s OK to not like super hoppy, high ABV imperial IPAs. It’s OK if you find the salty sour of a gose a bit too much for your particular preferences. It’s OK to say, “I have tried this, and it is not for me.”

The only thing you’re obligated to do is appreciate that someone else, somewhere, probably does like that style. Maybe likes it so much they’re known to throw “favorite” in front of it whenever it comes up in conversation. You don’t have to like a beer, but always keep in mind: your not liking it doesn’t make it bad. Subjective bad and objective bad are wildly different beasts. If you’re into beer enough to have opinions (and don’t just enjoy it as a drink), it’s on you to be able to acknowledge when a beer is well made but not to your tastes, verses poorly made, and not up to the quality standards of excellent beer.

Memory is tied to taste, and I was hoping that sipping on some Belgian beer would cause a chemical cascade of mnemonic flashes. But it didn’t. It just reminded me of all the ways I’ve tried to force myself to like a style because of faux cultural pressure and personally manufactured expectation, and how, when looking at it in hindsight, that seems like a very silly thing.

Millstone Cellars – Fruit, Funk, Fermentation

I stuck my nose deep into the little glass of pale yellow, letting my nostrils swim in a smell I’d never expect from a cider: blue cheese.

Kyle Sherrer played thief-wielding, sample-slinging host to us this weekend, as he lead us around his cidery, Millstone Cellars. With his father, Curt, Kyle makes cider and mead using old world methods: wood barrels, wild yeasts, spontaneous fermentation. They’re creating dry marvels from a forgotten time, using locally sourced ingredients (even some from their own backyard).

I could wax voluble about the intriguing apple, honey, and berry fermentations; the spicy wood and musty stone of the building; or the puckering joy of sour meads, but I’ll let the pictures do the talking.

Of Pints and Prices

Ever stare at a bar’s tap list, letting the myriad bubbly options sink slowly into your brain as you swirl that first potential sip over the phantom taste buds of your imagination? Ever get so excited that you forget to look at the sneaky little number winking at you from the right of the beer’s name? Ever suddenly stop, mid-Pavlovian drool, to say, “Wait, really? $7 for a pint? That’s like 43 cents an ounce! We’re getting dangerously close to printer ink prices, here!”

You’re not alone. The price of a pint has climbed steadily in positive correlation to beer’s national popularity, to the point where many are forced to budget their brew to avoid Chapter 14 (Beer Bankruptcy). At a glance, these upwardly creeping prices seem exorbitant, and out of reach of people without disposable income searing a hole in their Levis. Beer is supposed to be the layman’s drink, the libation of the laborer, that less snotty or less punchy variant to wine or whiskey. It’s not supposed to be expensive, and yet here we are, where the quality of beer in general has improved (for the most part), and can finally be justified in green, paper terms.

The beer pricing discussion often grabs onto and swings around ABV; a lot of the trendy new “session” IPAs boast alcohol in the sub-5% range. By brewing definition, less alcohol in a final beer means less malt used in the recipe, which should in theory, translate to savings for the drinker, right?

If you’re approaching the beer world from a homebrewer’s perspective, you’d be right. Cutting a significant amount of malt from your recipe would lead to a much cheaper final beer. But homebrewers have next to no overhead costs; their equipment is already paid for, they have no property rental cost (a mortgage doesn’t count), and they don’t have to pay any employees for their time.

If you tilt your head and squint your eyes a little bit to look at brewing from a purely business perspective, factoring in the (somewhat, to some people) hidden costs of property rental, staff salaries, and utilities, you find that ingredients account for barely 15% of the total price of a beer. Significantly adjusting the amount of malt might lead to a net difference (per pint) that could be measured in a take-a-penny, leave-a-penny tray.

Higher ABV and aged beers tend to be more expensive not (only) because their ingredient cost is higher, but because of the opportunity cost associated with managing and storing that beer when it could have been sold as is, right away. If an imperial stout sits in barrels for 8 weeks after it has finished fermenting, that’s 8 weeks the non-barrel aged version could have been sold; 8 weeks where the brewery could have turned a profit. When it does finally pop out of the wood, all bolstered by bourbon, the brewery has to charge more for the beer to make up for lost time.

Defying conventional logic, ingredients play but a bit role in the price of your beer. As a rough basis, the following numbers reflect the brewing costs* of a small, local, US brewery for an average, middle of the road beer (per $7 pint):

Malt: $0.21
Hops: $0.06
Other ingredients (spices, fruit, veggies, etc): $0.01
Yeast: $0.06
Total ingredient cost per pint: $0.34

Utilities: $0.06
Rent, employee salaries, other: $1.77
Total overhead cost per pint: $1.83

Total brewery cost per pint: $2.17

So if you’re paying $7 a pint, where does that additional $4.83 you shovel out of your poor wallet onto the ring-stained wood come from? A portion goes to the distributor (as part of the three tier system of beer distribution in the US) who takes a cut to move the beer from brewery to barroom. But if the brewery sells their beer at cost, the distributor only takes ~75 cents, meaning the other $4.08 comes from bar markup.

Before you scoff at that and swear to never drink another beer at the bar again, know that these prices are generally justified. To function properly, a bar has to pay for liquor licenses, staff training, labor in the form of cleaning and hauling and pouring, draft lines and systems, property rental, taxes, and other sundry business related expenses. They’re also probably trying to turn a profit to remain solvent, pay down any business loans, and make the owner some money, which is sort of the whole spirit of capitalism.

Of every beer you buy at the bar, ~25% of the price goes back to the brewery. Beer is a game of scale; the more beer a brewery can sell, the relatively cheaper their overhead becomes, as their static costs are further divided by every extra barrel they can produce and sell. If it wasn’t obvious before, this stresses the importance of the brewery-connected taproom (and should fuel your consumer desire to drink there if you support the brewery). Every beer sold in-house means all the money stays at the brewery, and none is split with distributors or bars.

All of this financial theorycrafting mashes out and boils down to a sweet wort of knowing what you’re paying for. When you slap down $7 for a pint, you’re not paying for the sum of the ingredients, no matter how exotic the hops or rich and decadent the malt profile. You’re paying for the expertise of the brewer, her time and energy, the collective work of a brewery’s staff to deliver a product that you probably couldn’t make yourself.

You’re paying for knowledge, practice, patience; for brewing as a service, not beer as a food.

*These numbers were provided by Jailbreak Brewing company of Laurel, MD, and are representative only. Specific numbers can/will change based on the size and popularity of a brewery, and may also fluctuate by state/region. Please do not quote me or Jailbreak on these numbers, as they’re supposed to be for educational reference purposes only 🙂

A special thanks for the folks at Jailbreak for supplying me with some sample monetary figures!

Landing Gear Retracted

This time tomorrow, my feet will be dancing on English soil. I haven’t been back home home since 2006; mere excitement can’t capture my emotions right now, as I visualize pints of mild resting dutifully on welcoming wooden bars. Unfortunately, between getting ready for the trip, regular work, a side project, and other sundry adult-type responsibilities I won’t bore you with, I’ve found very little time to cobble my thoughts into any kind of narrative you’d want to read. So instead, here are a bunch of pictures (from the 2014 Philly Beer Week) to substitute for real content while I’m on vacation.

(I’ve got about 10 posts in draft, and another 10 ideas based on my England trip, so please excuse this slight delay in our regularly scheduled program)

You Don’t Have to Love Brewing to Love Beer

Last weekend, I had the pleasure of teaching a group of close friends how to brew. We gathered in our host’s driveway like a gaggle of birds flocking to a piece of tossed bread, excited to gorge our brains on malty knowledge, to create and learn all in one very efficient swoop. I’ve taught classes at a corporate level before, slinging SharePoint solutions like a pro, but I’d never taught a class on how to brew. I went crazy with it. I even made a 7-page handout!

You forget, once you’ve fully ingrained yourself in a process, how many aspects of the art you take for granted. As I held up a cylinder full of golden wort to explain hydrometers, sugar density, and original gravity like these were concepts the average person should know about, it struck me how involved and complicated brewing must seem to someone who hasn’t been studying and physically doing it for nearly ten years. I did my best to explain (in less scientific terms) how water, sugar, hops, and yeast eventually become the drink we all immediately recognize, which forced me to reanalyze brewing as an activity, and it’s applicability as a hobby.

At some point, when I was explaining how to troubleshoot a stuck fermentation, and how relatively subtle changes in temperature can result in unwanted off flavors, I realized that homebrewing is a high risk, low reward venture. It requires a significant start up cost, large swaths of free time, and until you’ve done it for a while, results in pretty mediocre beer. It requires a lot of study, a lot of patience, and sometimes, a light sprinkling of luck. It’s clearly not a hobby for everyone.

A strange current undulates deep in the aquifers beneath craft beer culture, an ebb that pulls beer drinkers into production breweries, and a flow that pushes them to gaze upon rows of stainless steel tanks in jaw-dropped awe. The phenomena is unique to beer (from what I can tell); writers do not spend their time inside publishing company warehouses, admiring printers and book binding machines, while comparing and rating fonts. Foodies rarely walk into the kitchens of their favorite restaurants to grab a quick bite with the head chef while admiring his oven. In other fields, such behavior would be bizarre, possibly even ridiculed.

Part of the allure of a brewery comes from novelty; prior to the last few years, the only options you really had to see beer-making in action required generic tours through massive Bud and Miller industrial complexes. Many people who have loved beer for a long time now get to peek behind the curtain, see that the great and powerful is actually the organized and practical, demystify the processes and the people that lead to their favorite drink. General brewery openness to invite the libatious public into their work space shows just how welcoming our little community really is, but comes with an oft overlooked side effect that mars all that generous inclusivity with unintended exclusivity.

The obsession with breweries makes it seem like you have to love brewing if you already love beer. Everyone else seems enamored by the creative side, puppy-love smitten by the idea that beer is crafted by people, not just spawned in bottles and distributed to the masses. So why not you? I’ve heard several friends and colleagues announce, with much dejection, that they “just can’t get into brewing,” or “I tried homebrewing, and didn’t enjoy it,” their voices tinted with frustration and failure. There is an implication that the enjoyment of the product is inextricably tied to the enjoyment of the process, and that you cannot possibly be into one without being into the other. A subconscious malignant trend whispers mean words to the dark, suggesting that people who love to drink beer aren’t “real beer people” unless they frequent every brewery in a fifty mile radius, and homebrew every weekend.

I’m here to tell you that’s all nonsense. In a commercial context, there will always exist two subsets of people: creators and consumers. While there will inevitably be some cross over, in nearly every other modern industry, the lines are pretty cleanly drawn between the two groups. You don’t expect every voracious reader to also be a writer, or study sentence structure and grammar, do you? You’d never suggest someone who enjoys delicious food also learn how to cook every dish they enjoy, Iron Chef style, right? We appreciate the creators because without them we wouldn’t have our products to consume, but trying to culturally tie creation and consumption together will lead to a lot of unreasonable expectations, and possibly some alienating let downs when reality deviates from the prescribed popular path.

It’s OK to not want to try your hand at homebrewing, or to find the process tedious and unrewarding.

It’s OK to love beer for it’s mosaic variety and deliciousness without giving a single solitary shit about how it transformed from raw ingredients to decadent ambrosia.

It’s OK to not want to visit breweries, to not have an aesthetic opinion about stainless steel versus copper, to not really care at what temperature the grain for your favorite beer was mashed.

You can love, respect, and enjoy beer without any of that. You should still maintain a healthy respect for those who do spend their time making beer (as long as they do it well), but feel no shame in not wanting to pack up and move yourself to that side of the beerish world. While it would be pretty difficult to love brewing if you didn’t love beer, never let the culture, or any unspoken trend, suggest the opposite is true.

It’s OK, really, to love brew as a noun, but not as a verb.

“If it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.” ― Leo Tolstoy

 

Nothing Gets Past Me, I’m the Age Verification System

Hey, stop right there. Yea, you, the one with the greasy mitts on that keyboard, trying to sneak by me like some kind of animal who is inherently sneaky, like a fox or something. Who do you think you are?

You think you can type in that URL and waltz in here like the belle of some fancy ball that I didn’t get invited to because I’m socially awkward? Well you better think again, cupcake. This here brewing website falls squarely in the lands of my jurisdiction, my protectorate, my realm. I’m the shining armored knightly savior turned bouncer because he was low on cash after all the dragons migrated south for the winter. I’m it, the glacial wall, the Tim Howard of this website. I, in all my power and glory, am the Age Verification System.

I have one job, and it’s to keep underage law-breakers like you from entering this site before you’ve seen at least 252 moons (maybe 253 depending on how blue those moons got). We can’t just have innocent children looking at label art or reading descriptions of beer; we don’t know what the long term ramifications of such wanton hedonism could lead to. We need to protect the innocent young folks out there from the slinking, smirking evils of taproom hours and release updates. If someone doesn’t put the children first, they’ll end up last, or possibly third or fourth which is just as bad, really.

So here I stand, questioning, probing, challenging, keeping this law all legal and stuff. You want in? You want to cross this SSL threshold and enter this veritable Valhalla? Fine, but I’m not going to make it easy. You have to prove yourself. Test your mettle. Show you’re experienced enough to take on this quest.

You ready?

Question the first!

Are you at least twenty-one years old!?

Yea?

OK, well off you go then.

What, no, I don’t need to see your ID. I trust you. I mean, if we can’t just trust each other, what kind of world do we have to accept that we live in? No, no, you’re good, I don’t need any proof. I was just encouraged to ask, not by law like I suggested before (at least in the USA), but because of a vague recommendation established by the FTC in 2008.

Since I know you’re 21 now, I’d like to suggest that in the future you bring a box of cookies and walk right through this completely unguarded door on my left, but my boss has sort of demanded that I ask you how old you are every time you visit. Yea, I don’t get it either, but thems the breaks. At least he’s just using the yes or no method; can you imagine how annoying it would be if you had to give me your full date of birth every time? You’d probably just start making it up after a while.

I know, right? An underage kid can physically walk into a liquor store and wander around unimpeded as long as they don’t physically handle the alcohol, so you’d think this sort of superfluous annoyance would phase out because of basic logic. Heh, look at me, talking myself out of a job again. My first gig was in the porn industry (look, I was young, needed money, and the dragons had all flown south for the winter), but despite a robust selection of employers, my particular skill set soon became obsolete. Mostly because everyone realized that leaving one unarmed guard at the front door to a building with 5,000,000 backdoors was a less than efficient security system. But honesty, I only stand here and guard the site because I’m supposed to. I work to live, not live to work, you know?

Look, I want to protect the kids. I really do. They’re our future (or so Whitney Houston lead me to believe), and we should do our best not to expose them to all sorts of brain altering crap before they’ve had a chance to mature properly. That’s why I stand here, the ever faithful watch dog. I can’t have a buzzed teenager on my conscience.

Yea. It does seems sort of pointless given the exposure they’ll get to much, much worse than the contents of a brewery’s website on television, on the radio, in magazines, from their peers, from their parents, from professional athletes, or from pretty much every conceivable source of media extant in the world today.

But I’m not here to sort out what’s totally pointless, and what’s only kind of totally pointless.

I just want to do my job. If you’re going in, go in, otherwise I might forget who you are and be required to ask you how old you are again. Wait, it has already been too long. I can’t trust you’re the same age you were 5 minutes ago.

Are you at least twenty-one years old!?

Yea?

Alright sweet, enjoy your visit.

“Great effort is required to arrest decay and restore vigor. One must exercise proper deliberation, plan carefully before making a move, and be alert in guarding against relapse following a renaissance.” – Horace

Beer Review: Bell’s Two Hearted Ale

Through the morning winking between white oaks, through the steam rising up from my dark roast, through the headached fog of a bad night’s sleep, I can see my garden. From my office window all one hundred odd square feet lay bare; Maryland dirt formed into six long rows, surrounded by a Hadrian’s wall of recycled concrete pavers, barely ankle high, just enough to keep peace with the armies of grass on the other side. Gangly sweet peas cling desperately to bamboo teepees while across the road, their broccoli and Brussels sprouts neighbors can’t seem to rid their houses of pests. Tomato tenements block the light to the carrot slums below, and two stately Willamette hops scrape the sky, regal, austere.

A tell-tale banjo-pluck of an incoming email reminds me that now is not the time for dirt on hands. Now is the time for documentation and duties, for corporate and coworkers, for processes and paychecks. The job bought and keeps the land, but the land craves all my attention. On days when summer lets off the throttle and drops the heat into second gear, it becomes very difficult not to trade the sickly glow of blue monitors for the healthy glow of yellow sun.

I planted this year subconsciously, passively. Seeds were purchased; pots were filled; soil was fertilized; sprouts were watered. Not until I plucked the first pod from my peas, or saw the first hop cone popping from bine, did I realize that growing was my mind’s natural reaction to losing; green life a spiritual replacement for gray death. My obsession with creating a garden from seed, from creating life where there was just a handful of potential before, wasn’t random or strange, but grief manifest.

My heart is broken, ne’er to be repaired. The faults and cracks have finally cleaved the thing in two, left it beating two conflicting rhythms; one rasorial and flighty, the other responsible and grounded. Having two hearts presents a professional conundrum, because a sundered heart is a free heart, a heart suddenly opened wide to all the realities from which we often hide, a heart that by experiencing the worst, has nothing left to fear. A broken heart is to be envied if we’re being honest, as its owner awakes from the walking dream to a world where all possibilities and eventualities are real, both good and bad. A broken heart is liberation through pain, an audit on your life with red hot poker, an emancipating agreement signed with emotional and spiritual blood.

As I sit at my desk, trying my best to carefully sort technical from superfluous and turn jargon into justification, the mewing of a catbird and the wind rearranging the leaves of the trees pulls my mind away. The new half of my heart beats wildly, impulsively, telling me to go spend my time how I want to spend it, not how my brain tells me I should spend it, logically. More often than not, before the pragmatic tie-wearing half of my psychomachia can even show up to field an argument, I’m off running, or weeding, or watering, or just lying on my back, eyes closed, relishing all that extra Vitamin D production.

Even though it’s broken, this new heart is much kinder than my old heart. At least half thumps with jeux de vie, shedding apprehension about pursuing what I love, telling me with each cardiac cascade that I’m alive and as a result, should probably do my best to live. In the sea of red blood cells swims a spirit born again, a spirit who considers my brewing equipment more important than my government issue laptop, the fledgling fruit on my tomato plants more important than that ever looming deadline.

So nightly I scrub the dirt and toil from under my fingernails, rinse the sweat from my face and hair, plop down on the couch tired but satisfied. I pour myself into life outside of the nine-to-five like a beer into a glass, taking on a new shape where I had long been confined, roaring to a bubbly head with enthusiasm, settling to relax and and enjoy the creamy complexity of a Friday night heavily hopped with good stories and good friends. My heart is broken, split in two, and contrary to all long-held belief, to all established understanding of the matter, it may be the single best thing that ever happened to me.

“For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.” ― D.H. Lawrence

Ingredients in Beer

As a general response to certain current events, I find it necessary to list the ingredients in beer. Here they are. All of the main four (plus Irish moss), in various states of development and brewing. Feel free to send this link to anyone who demands a “full list of beer ingredients”

Malt striation: a rarely seen beerological phenomenon.

“How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.” ― Benjamin Disraeli

Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and caldron bubble.

Yeast: it makes brown sugar water into beer.