What’s Brewing At Brülosophy? | On NHC, A New Series, And More…

| NATIONAL HOMEBREWERS CONFERENCE |

We’re just 6 short weeks away from the start of the NHC in San Diego and I couldn’t be more excited! I’ll be heading down with some friends Wednesday morning and plan to attend the Brewing Network Anniversary Party that evening. I will be bringing at least 1, maybe 2, xBmt beers for conference-goers to sample. I’m not sure exactly how to approach this, but I’ll figure something out. I’ll also be doing a live triangle test and xBmt discussion with James and Steve from Basic Brewing Radio, I’m not certain when/where this will be, but I imagine details will be revealed on the podcast sometime before the conference begins.

A few oddballs have asked if I might be doing some sort of a meet-up. I don’t plan to, though I’d certainly love to high-five, hug, and hangout with anyone interested. What I’ll try to do is update my Brülosopher Facebook page regularly throughout the conference with what I’m up to, this might make me easier to find. Feel free to FB message or email me as well. I don’t plan on doing much other than tasting beer, attending seminars, tasting beer, sharing beer, and tasting beer.

If you’re not already a member of the AHA, you ought to consider joining! For $38/year you get access to some pretty awesome stuff– Zymurgy magazine, AHA Rallies, pub discounts, a fantastic homebrewing forum, and it qualifies you to enter the National Homebrew Competition, the world’s largest! By using the link in the sidebar, a small portion of your membership fee will go to support the stuff we’re doing here at Brülosophy.

| EXPERIMENTAL & NEW HOP SERIES |

I’ve been chatting with the folks at Yakima Valley Hops about partnering up on a new series focused on evaluating experimental and new hop varieties. The Brü Crew and I have settled on a single-hop Pale Ale recipe we’ll all be using for this project, the first batch of which is cold crashing as I type and will be hitting the keg soon. To start, we hope to publish 1 of these articles per month with a goal of increasing that to 2 per month relatively soon. The genius that is Matt Humbard of the Ph.D. in Beer blog has a similar series where he uses experimental hops in the same Saison recipe, we’ve talked about doing some collaborative stuff, which is something I’m really looking forward to.

The one very trivial thing I’m stuck on is what to call this series. We’ve narrowed it down to a few contenders and I figured I’d leave it to our readers to decide which one is best.

| UPDATED xBmt DATA COLLECTION SURVEY|

I’ve gone through a couple iterations of the xBmt survey, the goal being to create an efficient and less time consuming method for gathering the the most pertinant data. The survey we’ve been administering to participants of late starts with the blind triangle test where correct respondents move on to a comparative evaluation while incorrect respondents are cutoff from further questions. While this is good for parsing out those who aren’t capable of distinguishing between the different beers when completely unaware of the nature of the xBmt, some people have expressed interest in knowing if things might change if tasters are given the opportunity to take the triangle test after the nature of the xBmt is revealed. Following much thought and discussion, and without going into too much detail, we’ve developed a new survey that will take this into account. It will also focus slightly less on the subjective perceptions of the participants, as our main focus is on whether certain process, equipment, and ingredient variables create a significant difference in a population sample’s ability to distinguish between the different beers.

| THANK YOU! |

I’ve been contacted by a bunch of rad folks lately who have expressed interest in contributing to Brülosophy by performing their own xBmts. I can’t tell you how cool I think this is, the fact so many people are getting fired up about learning more about making beer at home! Unfortunately, there’s only so much we can do on this site, thus I’ve have had to turn most people down. However, I’d like to strongly encourage those who are interested in sharing the results of their own homebrew experimentation to do so over at ExperimentalBrew.com, a website put together by Experimental Homebrewing authors, Denny Conn and Drew Beechum.

I think that’s about it, thanks for allowing me to ramble a bit. As always, if you have any questions or comments, please do not hesitate to either leave them in the comments section below or contact me directly, I try to respond as soon as possible.

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| Read More |

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