FOOLCiRCLE

I just finished the Brew Your Own (BYO) magazine March-April issue today on lunch. BYO has been around for many a year and in some ways could be considered the staple of how a homebrew magazine should be designed.

This issue was about the same as all the others, OK in my opinion. Dunno why, but I always feel as if the magazine is mediocre at best.  Some of the subjects covered in this issue were: A nice article by Jamil Z on Ordinary Bitter, an article about using oatmeal in beer in particularly with Oatmeal Stouts, brewing gluten free beer, formulating a balanced recipe, malting your own barley, adding non-welded components to a brew kettle, and all of there typical every issue columns Last Call, Homebrew Profile, Systems That Make You Drool, Reader Recipe, Replicator, Tips from the Pros, and the Mr. Wizard article. It’s funny, reviewing right now, I think I like the typical every issue columns better than the full blow articles. They are shorter, funnier, and usually better written. Anyway, Jamil Z is one of my favorite regulars in the homebrew community and his article on Ordinary Bitter was nice, wish I read it before I brewed my EPA, but hey, whatever. I thought the next three major articles basically sucked and the writers must have been paid per word, especially the balanced recipe article. It was a bunch of fluff. The article on malting your own barley was a little too detailed orientated for light reading on lunch, but it did spark a spark for next fall brewing a beer with homegrown hops and barley that I malted – sweet! After that, all the typical articles are just fun to read. They aren’t trying to tell you how to do something from an Average Joe point of view, they just giving you info on what other homebrewers are up too. Well, except for maybe the Mr. Wizard article which can be quite technical, but is coming from a dude who knows what’s up. Enough for now.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 25th, 2007 at 9:07 pm and is filed under Magazines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.