Countdown to Dry July

A month away from beer?! I better get some drinking in then. So I have decided to take up the challenge and stay off the booze for the month of July. 30 days without a beer… woah. Wait, what? July has 31 days? Who made the stupid decision to do this on a long...

Fill your boots… or maybe just your bottles

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...

Black Santa: an oatmeal stout

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...

The Sierra Endeavour

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...

Dragon Chaser

I used to be a simple guy that would rate beer on a two star system, consisting of thumbs up or thumbs down, self explanatory really, but now I’m a little more complicated. Not overly so however. These days I tend to use a 5 star rating system where 1 star would be “No...

Almost Brew Day

Just a quick post today. Brew day is almost upon us. It seems to have crept up rather quickly and unannounced, but maybe that’s just from the hustle-bustle of our regular lives getting in the way of brewing. In the last week we managed to assemble all the final pieces of the brew kit...

Sydney marathon for the beer palate

The next few posts will comprise my travel/beer diary as Bill of Beer discovers more of Australia and the beers they are brewing. This is the third in a six-part series. We travelled leaps and bounds on day three of the search for good beer and evidently, so has the craft beer market in Australia....