Saturday 21st of April, I awoke with the trembling excitement of a well-behaved child on Christmas morning. From midday, me and the lads would be out sampling tasty brews and rubbing noses with beer geeks from near and afar. In case you missed the memo; the latest addition to Auckland’s burgeoning craft beer scene is [...]
The twitter network works! Last Thursday I found out on twitter that the latest addition to Auckland’s craft beer scene had finally opened. The place I’m talking about is Hopscotch Beer Company. Hopscotch has recently obtained their license to sell alcohol and are now selling a great range of beer on fill-your-own taps. I made [...]
- Continue reading Fill your boots… or maybe just your bottles
So Christchurch has had close to 6000 quakes since February 2011, but I wonder if they’ve ever experienced a disaster like we had on our last batch of home brew. We have been having trouble with our efficiency and we decided we needed further modifications to the brew kit to sort it out. We looked [...]
It has been just over one year since my Grandad passed away and last weekend the family got together for a bbq and a beer in his memory. I had recently made the discovery that Grandad had been an avid homebrewer in his time, though the recollections of his success seem to be pretty varied. [...]
Bourbon, beer and barbecue. Individually these are all great things to spend a Sunday afternoon indulging in, but bring them all together and you have an inaugural collaborative event put on by Sam Snead and Nigel Kelly of House of Whiskey and Luke Nicholas of Epic Beer. The event consisted of plenty of samples beers [...]
The time off over Christmas and New Year’s gave us some extra time to get to know our brew kit so we had to take advantage of it. On our first brew day we discovered our burners may have been mounted a bit high, so to avoid flames lapping out everywhere and melting all our [...]
I imagine if you’re like me, your Christmas/New Year’s break has provided ample opportunity to over-indulge in great beer as well as some not-so-great beer; as provided by uncles and aunties that you only ever see once a year, and very little time hanging around your computer reading or posting blogs. We were fortunate enough [...]
… one of my favourite brewers gave to me an absolutely fantastic bottle of beer. That brewer being Epic and the beer being the new Epicurean Coffee & Fig Imperial Oatmeal Stout. I had been following this beer rather closely from the moment I heard about it. Coffee, figs and then coconut; all these things [...]
A flash of inspiration the week before bottling gave us a name for our first batch of all-grain home brew, a beer based on Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. We named it the ‘Sierra Endeva’, and it seemed very appropriate for our first foray into this brewing method. Approaching bottling day, we figured it would pretty [...]
Please forgive this post, as my memory can be a little jaded and I was supposed to write this post two weeks ago when we actually had our brew day. We have had to overcome many challenges on our way to brew day, including a completely failed attempt at brew day the weekend prior. All [...]
- Continue reading Sparging, wort and other unappetising words we didn’t know about beer
