In this episode, we were live at Hop Fusion Aleworks in the ever-growing Southside area of Fort Worth, TX, with co-founders Matt Hill and Macy Moore and a crowd of locals, the Cap and Hare Club happy hour group, and even a few Come and Brew It Radio listeners to try our first night of recording on location live.
Matt and Macy were both homebrewers with the same dream many of us have of opening their own brewery. But unlike most of us, they actually executed a plan and built Hop Fusion Aleworks from the ground up over a period of a year and a half, with a massive amount of their own blood, sweat, and tears. All with the goal of delivering great local experiences in their taproom, while also distributing their unique and tasty craft beer throughout Texas. And in just a few short months after opening, their popularity has soared and they are well on their way to accomplishing their goals.
In this episode, we discuss some recent malt experiments we did for a tasting at the last Cap and Hare meeting and we start a regular discussion about the many types of hops available to brewers, covering American, English, and Noble hop varieties. This time around, we cover Cascade and Northern Brewer for the American variety, East Kent Goldings and Target for the English variety, and Hallertau Mittelfruh and Saaz for the Noble variety.
In this episode, we talk about making the best out of your brew year by planning brews in advance to make sure you get what you want, when you want it. Whether it’s a specific style for a season or because you want to enter competitions or because you need to brew certain styles based on the weather being in your favor. All you have to do is consider your needs, what options you have, and how you can best use them. And with a plan, you can be sure you get those brews scheduled before those best times pass.
In this episode, we have the guys from the Collective Brewing Project back in studio after just over a year since their last visit to update us on what’s been happening at the brewery, tell us about their new barrel program, and help us develop and discuss a recipe that’d be good for putting in your own barrels or perhaps to start your own solera project with beers you already have at home.
In this episode, we discuss a recent hot topic in beer: East Coast IPAs vs West Coast IPAs. The IPA originated in England and was first updated into an American version on the East Coast, when American hops were used with English ale yeasts. Then, brewers on the West Coast grabbed it and took it to another level with hop character and bitterness and that became the generally accepted standard when anyone mentioned “an IPA”. But then the East Coast made a comeback that blended their original version with characteristics of the West Coast to create hazy, golden, malt-driven hop bombs that beer lovers fell in love with. And that’s when the battle began over which type was better. Here, we discuss both styles and brewing methods to get what you want out of them.
In this episode, we keep it style specific and spend the evening talking about one of our all-time favorites, the Imperial Stout. A favorite beverage for winter everywhere, even in Texas where it was 78 degrees the day before we recorded on the 28th of December and 60 on the day of the recording. Mainly because it’s a big, bold heavy hitter of a beer, whether it’s the American or English version. Which makes it the perfect accompaniment to any holiday gatherings with or without the family. So, we try to give it the praise it deserves while we try a variety of samples.
In this episode, we talk about a few ways you might be able to salvage a beer that’s going wrong or just doesn’t live up to what you wanted it to be. We’ve kind of discussed it in the past, but wanted to hit it again because It can happen to the best of us and it probably WILL happen to you at some point. Just because of chance. More of us have problems with a batch that didn’t come out the way we wanted and we’ll focus mostly on that, but there are definitely those times when a batch gets infected or stuck that you might be able to save it if you get to it in time or just want to experiment.
We want to warn you that we had some technical issues during the recording of this episode. Jimmy's mic didn't make it through on the usual recording, but you can also check out our Facebook Live version for what we caught of him there. Plus, we had some memory error stops and the audio version is more concise, since we got a little loose at the end. :)
In this episode, we give our friend Keith Kilker, founder and brewer at Guadalupe Brewing Co., a phone call to talk about what they have going on down in New Braunfels and about what has been going on in the craft beer industry lately with Big Beer buying out breweries. Keith has strong feelings about his independence and has worked hard to fulfill his passion, brewing great beer for a local crowd. (Recorded mid-Dec 2016)
In this episode, we discuss BJCP style 32 Smoked Beers while we sample some commercial examples from Schlenkerla that were bought locally, against those recently brought back from Schlenkerla’s home town, Bamberg, Germany. The category has two subcategories, including 32A Classic Style Smoked Beers and 32B Specialty Smoked Beers. However, both categories have the same basic description to start: A smoke-enhanced beer showing good balance between the smoke and beer character, while remaining pleasant to drink.