BYO Magazine – September Issue
Normally I’ll sit here with the magazine in front of me as I review it, but this time I happened to forget it, so don’t be surprised if there is more added to this post later.
Also, BYO is the worst about keeping their website up to date. Since I breezed through this issue in one lunch (per usual) I have been sitting on it for about a week waiting for BYO to throw a picture of the new cover up so I could use it here. Didn’t happen, so now I took the lame picture above to use in the post.
The cover actually grabbed my attention for once. Professional brewer on the cover (Great Divide president/brewer), the promise of 10 gold medal clones, and brewing with coffee – all things I am interested in. Brian Dunn (the Great Divide guy) brews great beer so I was waiting for an interesting article, guess what? No article, just a paragraph or so of him talking about how to properly brew an Old Ruffian Barleywine, which happened to win a gold medal, which happens to be one of the 10 clones. Then there was nine other snippets from nine other non-exciting brewers about nine OK sounding beers – double let down. Then there was the article on coffee and beer. It was mostly interesting, but felt very opinionated. Like I was looking for more of a scientific approach where he would brew the same beer repeatedly and use different kinds of coffee additions and or even different roasts or regional coffees. Like I could think of three ways to incorporate coffee: beans, ground, and brewed. And also multiple times to add these forms of coffee: to the mash tun, to the boil (different times), to the fermenter, to secondary, at bottling – it was a little lame honestly. He basically told you what he liked best through his trial and error but never really explained the trials, oh well. Other than that I don’t remember the articles being very remarkable, so they probably weren’t. Though this is the magazine I bitch about the most, I still enjoy reading it, it’s the fluff of the beer magazine community, to me.
August 30th, 2007 at 10:38 pm
You just read it ’cause they put your picture in it 😉
September 2nd, 2007 at 1:38 pm
Yeah. This latest issue was a major let down.
Intersting that you said “Brewing with coffee” caught your interest. I’m planning on a coffee porter sometime soon. Was planning on adding the coffee at flame-out, and kind of steeping / whirlpooling it as it cooled. I think the hops and false bottom should filter most of the grounds out (you’ve witnessed that) as long as I have a relatively course grind. I’m thinking that 4-6 oz per 5 gallons should work out about right… (2-3 beers would be about equivalent to a cup of coffee).
Lemme know if you want to make it a monster batch and brew it together.