In this episode, we have our friend and new TBI staff member Nigel Curtis sitting in with us to discuss English beer styles and sample a few beers he recently brought back from a trip to his old stomping grounds in Peterborough, England. If you check the new 2015 BJCP guidelines, you’ll find that numerous styles were born in England like British Bitters, Pale Commonwealth Beers, Brown British Beers, Dark British Beers, and Strong British Ales. And that doesn’t even include the near cousins, Scottish Ale and Irish Beer. So, we're talking about a large contribution to beer and brewing.
In this episode, we talk about the experiences we’ve had with our new GigaYeast double pitch packs and have a short phone call with GigaYeast founder, Jim Withee. We haven’t had their products for very long, but we like what we’ve tried so far and we have a handful of beers we’ve brewed with them that we sample and discuss. We also have a split batch that we’ve used other yeast on to help us compare the differences. And who brought that split batch to help us out? Our friend Brandon Martin, who is joining us in the discussion.
In this longer than usual episode, we’ve invited our friend Kevin Lane from Fermentis back into the studio to join us in a discussion about the basics of recipe formulation. Hopefully, to help clarify the process for those of you that are still looking for answers. And later in the episode, we also had a surprise guest stop in to contribute to the show because James Lallande came by to add his thoughts on recipe development.
In this episode, we’ll discuss the process of getting started with kegging--from post fermentation practices like clarification through carbonation. We'll even cover some bottling. We almost always recommend that our customers move to kegging as soon as they have the space for a temperature controlled chest freezer or a standing refrigerator. We know that it’s an investment, but there hasn’t been a brewer yet to tell us that they regretted their decision to replace bottle conditioning with keg serving and storage. In fact, it often opens up a whole new avenue in the hobby of homebrewing, by allowing homebrewers a coordinated setup to play with, where they can start collecting things like tap handles or maybe even turn their chest freezer into a piece of fine beer filled furniture that fits in any room of their home.